Pierre Bourdieu and democratic politics : the mystery of ministry 9780745634876, 0745634877, 9780745634883, 0745634885

Table of contents :
Contents
Contributors
Introduction: Symbolic Power and Democratic Practice
The Personal Politics of Pierre Bourdieu
Democratic Politics in Bourdieu’s Work
Implications of Bourdieu’s Theories for Democratic Struggles
Notes
From the King’s House to the Reason of State: A Model of the Genesis of the Bureaucratic Field
The Dynastic Oligarchy and the New Mode of Reproduction
The Logic of the Process of Bureaucratization
Notes
The Mystery of Ministry: From Particular Wills to the General Will
Notes
Scholarship with Commitment: On the Political Engagements of Pierre Bourdieu
Against the Science of Political Dispossession
Waging Struggles at the European Level: Reinventing a Collective Intellectual
The Media, Servant of the “Conservative Revolution”
A Double Historicization of Electoral Practices
Distinction and Secession
Conclusion: Constituting a Body
“Making the People Speak”: On the Social Uses of and Reactions to Public Opinion Polls
Symbolic Power in the Rule of the “State Nobility”
The Making and Breaking of the Czechoslovak Political Field
The Formation of the “Right” and “Left” Ideological Packages
Notes
Key Writings of Pierre Bourdieu on Democratic Politics

Citation preview

OXJRDIE XJ

«Democratic O U IT IC S

Edited by Loïc Wacquant

PIERRE BOURDIEU AND DEMOCRATIC POLITICS

Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics The Mystery of Ministry Edited by Loïc W acquant

v horr.Bs J Bata Library

t r e n t u n iv e rs ity pn'tRBOROUGH. ONTARIO

polity

Copyright © this collection, Introduction and Key W ritings, Polity, 2005. Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 copyright © Blackwell Publishing. C hapter 7 copyright © Loïc W acquant. Chapter 8 copyright © Gil Eyal. C hapter 9 copyright © Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc W acquant. First published in 2005 by Polity Press Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cam bridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 M ain Street M alden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transm itted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, w ithout the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN: 0-7456-3487-7 ISBN: 0-7456-3488-5 (pb) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd, H ong Kong Printed and bound in G reat Britain by M PG Books Ltd., Bodmin, C ornw all. The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure th at the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee th at a site will rem ain live or th at the content is or will rem ain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further inform ation on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk

\

Contents

Contributors Introduction: Symbolic Power and Democratic Practice 1 Pointers on Pierre Bourdieu and DemocraticPolitics

vii I 10

Loïc Wacquant

2

From the King’s House to the Reason of State: A Model of the Genesis of the BureaucraticField

29

Pierre Bourdieu

3

The Mystery of Ministry: From Particular Wills to the General W ill

55

Pierre Bourdieu

4

Scholarship with Commitment: On the Political Engagements of Pierre Bourdieu

64

Franck Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo

5

Ancien Régime Ballots: A Double Historicization of Electoral Practices Olivier Christin

91

VI

6

CONTENTS

“ Making the People Speak” : O n th e Social Uses o f and Reactions to Public O p in io n Polls Patrick Champagne

7

Symbolic Power in the Rule o f the “ State N o b ility ” Loïc Wacquant

8

The Making and Breaking o f th e C zech o slo va k Political Field Gil Eyal

9

The Cunning o f Im perialist Reason Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant

I I I

I 33

15 I

I 78

Key W ritings o f Pierre Bourdieu on Democratic Politics

I 99 »

Index

2 Q2

Contributors

Pierre Bourdieu held the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France, where he directed the Center for European Sociology, the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, and the publishing house Raisons d’agir Editions until he passed away in 2002. He is one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century as well as a leading public intellectual involved in the global mobilization against neolib­ eralism. He is the author of numerous classics of sociology and anthro­ pology. Among them are Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (1970, trans. 1977), Outline o f a Theory o f Practice (1972, trans. 1977), Distinction: A Social Critique o f the Judgment o f Taste (1979, trans. 1984), Homo Academicus (1984, trans. 1988), The Rules o f Art: Genesis and Structure o f the Artistic Field (1992, trans. 1996), and Pascalian Meditations (1997, trans. 2000). Patrick Champagne is a Researcher at the Center for European Soci­ ology in Paris and at INRA. His research spans the transformation of rural society and economy, political sociology, and the media. He is the author of Faire l’opinion. Le nouveau jeu politique (1989) and L’Héritage refusé. La crise de la reproduction sociale de la paysan­ nerie française, 1950-2000 (2002). His ongoing work focuses on the transformations of the journalistic field and their effects on political practices and other fields of cultural production. Olivier Christin is Professor of History at the University of Lyon and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. His work deals with religion, culture, and art in early modern Europe, with an emphasis

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on social and symbolic struggles during the Reformation. His books include La Paix de religion. Autonomisation de la raison politique au XVIe siècle (1997) and Les Yeux pour le croire. Les Dix Com­ mandements en images, XVe-XVIIIe siècles (2003). His current research deals with the iconography of Protestantism. Thierry Discepolo is co-editor (with Franck Poupeau) of Pierre Bour­ dieu, Interventions, 1961-2001. Science sociale et action politique (

2002 ) .

Gil Eyal is Associate Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. His areas of expertise are intellectuals and knowledge, political sociology, and the post-socialist transformation of Eastern Europe. He is the author of Making Capitalism without Capitalists: The New Ruling Elites in Eastern Europe (with Ivan Szelenyi and Eleanor Townsley, 1998) and The Origins o f Postcommunist Elites: From the Prague Spring to the Breakup o f Czechoslovakia (2003). He is now writing a book about Israeli Orientalism and Middle Eastern Studies and their ties to the Israeli government and military. Franck Poupeau is a Researcher at the Center for European Sociol­ ogy in Paris. His fields of inquiry include education, the sociology of science, social movements, and urban inequality. He is the author of Line Sociologie d'Etat. L’école et ses experts en France (2003) and Contestations scolaires et ordre social. Les enseignants de SeineSaint-Denis en grève (2004). His ongoing research maps out the polit­ ical economy of water distribution in La Paz, Bolivia, in its relation to sociopolitical struggles over the state in Latin America in the era of neoliberalism. Loïc Wacquant is Distinguished University Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the New School for Social Research and a Researcher at the Center for European Sociology in Paris. His inter­ ests span comparative urban marginality, the penal state, bodily crafts, and the politics of reason. His books include Body and Soul: Ethnographic Notebooks o f an Apprentice Boxer (2000, trans. 2004) and Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise o f Neoliberal Penality (2005). His current investigations comprise a carnal anthropology of desire and a historical sociology of racial domination.

Introduction: Symbolic Power and Democratic Practice

To the friends and colleagues who, from time to time, queried me about Pierre Bourdieu’s outlook on politics, I used to say that he was without contest the single most intensely political person I had ever encountered, yet that he was not “political” in the conventional sense that they and I would spontaneously recognize and agree upon (as when we speak of someone being “into” politics). Although I was not fully satisfied with this curtailed characterization, I was never quite able to encapsulate the tensionful stance, made up of consum­ ing interest and principled diffidence, abiding ardor and disenchanted lucidity, that animated him until I worked on this volume of essays that explicate, illustrate, and extend his theories of and for the social production of democratic politics. Now, reflecting back, I would simply respond that he was, if I may be permitted this nearoxymoronic expression, sociologically political. By this I mean that Pierre Bourdieu never let his sociological guard down an inch, never put away his analytical artillery to cool off for a minute, especially not when he was dealing with political matters, whether in his private ruminations about current events or in his scholarly investigations into the affairs of the City. He engaged with issues of power, public policy, and social justice in a manner that breached the accepted separation of science and life, the conceptual and the personal, and continually crossed that “sacred border between culture and politics, pure thought and the triviality of the agora”1 that he saw as one major obstacle to a genuine democracy. He did so not by wishing away their constitutive differences but, rather, by articulating them through the ceaseless intellectual ascesis

2

IN T R O D U C TIO N

mandated by his sociology. In Moebius-strip fashion, Bourdieu’s sci­ entific vision of the world was the vessel for his perception of poli­ tics at the same time as his political appreciation of social reality was the engine of his interest in and indignation at that reality, and the fount of his urge to thrust it into the sill of social science so that we may increase our chances of transforming it, of eventually becoming something like “political subjects” - a regulative ideal to which he was always committed, however guarded he might have been about the likelihood of its practical realization. His was a dogged and allencompassing effort “to think politics without thinking politically”2 so that we may put ourselves, individually and collectively, in a posi­ tion to reflect and act in accordance with our cherished political values, in our intimate dealings and our professional endeavors no less than on the public stages set up for civic action by liberal democracies. As with all of his thought, Bourdieu’s views on democracy are the product of the resolute application of a small number of analytic principles and methodological postures. The first is the questioning of customary ways of thinking and acting politically through the radical historicization of everything having to do with democracy:3 its vocabulary, its official discourse and ordinary representations, its distinctive devices and associations, and, last but not least, the disci­ pline that claims to study it, political science - which enters into the reflexive sociology of politics not as an instrument but as an object of analysis, as one of the loquacious agencies that contribute to the ongoing operation of democratic regimes. The second is to undertake precisely what this science studiously omits, namely, the systematic excavation o f the social conditions o f possibility of democratic prac­ tices,4 which necessitates a twofold shift of focus. It demands, first, that we descend from the heavens of abstract ideas and lofty ideals (lionized by the spiritualist strand of political philosophy that has come into fashion since the anti-structuralist backlash of the mid­ seventies) to till empirically the soil of actually existing political behaviors, meanings, and organizations; and, second, that we locate not only political capacities inscribed in formal structures but also the varied political proclivities and expectations of concrete agents and how they come to be endowed (or not) with the categories, skills, and desires required to play the democratic game. In short, it asks that we ask the question of how the division between what Max Weber called “passive political agents” and “active political agents” is produced and reproduced. This is because, according to Bourdieu’s third major tenet of social inquiry, like all institutions democracy exists in those two states o f the

SYM BOLIC POWER A N D D E M O C R A T IC PRACTICE

3

social that are objective systems of positions and subjective bundles of dispositions deposited in agents in the guise of the cognitive and cona­ tive schemata that inform their thoughts, feelings, and conduct.5 The former are crystallized in the political field (the semi-autonomous microcosm within which parties and politicians vie to offer their serv­ ices to the citizenry) and the bureaucratic field (the notion Bourdieu elaborates to reframe the state as an arena of struggles over the defini­ tion and manipulation of public goods), and the latter in the mental structures that compose the political habitus. Sociology must grasp each by means of a genetic analysis of their constitution in order to reconstruct the evolving dialectic of habitus and field across the gamut of historical configurations, ranging from situations of agreement and reciprocal reinforcement at one end of the continuum to cases of dis­ cordance and mutual undermining at the other. Both of these states of political action, the objectified and the embodied, must in turn be sub­ jected to a nested double reading, objectivist and subjectivist (or, in another language, structuralist and phenomenological), capable of capturing the “twofold truth” of the political cosmos:6 citizens are inserted in a web of constraining relations “independent of their con­ sciousness and will,” as famously put by Marx, but politics is crucially about “will and representation,” to cite a phrase of Schopenhauer that Bourdieu liked to invoke to remind us that the social world is also made of and made by cognitive activity. This brings us to the fourth principle of Bourdieuan analysis: pay special attention to the specific efficacy o f symbolic power and to the social tricks it plays on us all, including on the social analyst who must beware not to get caught up in the very classification struggles she sets out to describe and explain. This principle is especially appo­ site to the analysis of politics, inasmuch as “political struggle is a cog­ nitive struggle (practical and theoretical) for the power to impose the legitimate vision of the social world”7- that is, the power to (re)make reality by preserving or altering the categories through which agents comprehend and construct that world. This means that sociology is an inescapably political science, in that it continually finds itself in competition with other professional producers of authoritative rep­ resentations of society, such as politicians, journalists, official experts, and political pundits, and that it necessarily perpetrates this “absolute barbarity that consists in questioning the fundamental presupposition that only politicians can speak politically.”8 The development of a lucid sociological understanding of political institutions and the nurturing of sociologically informed political dispositions are all the more urgent in an epoch when the derivative products of social science - such as the market rhetoric of efficiency, opinion polls, focus

4

IN T R O D U C TIO N

groups, and other political marketing techniques - have become major ingredients in the rationalization of domination: To realize that science has become an instrument of legitimation of power, that the new rulers govern in the name of the appearance of the political-economic science that one acquires at Science-Po [the French equivalent of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Public Policy or the London School of Economics] and in business schools, must not lead us to a romantic and regressive anti-scientism, which always coexists within dominant ideology with the professed cult of science. Rather, it calls for producing the conditions of a new scientific and political spirit, liberating because liberated from censorships.9

This book proceeds from the conviction, acquired through lectur­ ing intensively over the past several years to both academic and general audiences in a dozen countries swept by the neoliberal revo­ lution, from Argentina to Germany and from Canada to Greece, that the work of Pierre Bourdieu contains untapped intellectual resources for rethinking and renewing democratic struggles. For scholars, his writings harbor a trove of conceptual tools to plumb the perennial puzzles and the sweeping makeover of politics and policy in con­ temporary societies; for progressive activists and interested citizens around the globe, they are a signal source of insights, vista points, and inspiration in their battles to reclaim a measure of control over their collective fate in the age of deregulated labor, hypermobile capital, and pusillanimous states. Correspondingly, this volume examines Bourdieu’s manifold contributions to the theory and prac­ tice of democratic politics by explicating his core concepts of politi­ cal field and field of power, his historical model of the emergence of the modern bureaucratic state and its built-in possibilities and limi­ tations, and his influential analyses of the predicaments, practices, and institutions entailed in the sociosymbolic alchemy o f representa­ tion. The cogency and flexibility of these analytic instruments is demonstrated in a series of integrated discussions of voting, public opinion polls, party dynamics, class rule, and state building, as well as by rigorous and vigorous exegeses of Bourdieu’s own political engagements and theoretical treatment of the politics of recognition and reason. The opening chapter provides “Pointers on Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics.” It charts the connections between his personal political views, the main nodes of his sociology of political life, and the implications of this sociology for progressive civic thought and action. It suggests that this work contains an original model of

SYMBOLIC POWER A N D D E M O C R A T IC PRACTICE

5

democratic politics in both the positive and the normative sense that calls for elaboration, application, and extension. The next two chap­ ters by Pierre Bourdieu lay out core historical and thematic buildingblocks of that model. The first chapter, “From the King’s Fiouse to the Reason of State,” mines historiographic studies to theorize the epochal transition from the dynastic to the bureaucratic state and the correlative shift from the family-based to the school-mediated mode of reproduction of rule that anchors the two antagonistic poles of the field of power in differentiated societies: the dynamic opposition between blood and merit, heredity and competency (or, in our times, property titles and credentials), issued out of the long gestation of the state bureaucracy inside the monarchic apparatus and stands at the crux of the division of labor of domination whose advance spawned the invention of the political field.10 The second chapter by Pierre Bourdieu, “The Mystery of Min­ istry,” tackles what constitutes in his eyes the epicentral conundrum of that field: the veritable transubstantiation whereby a group comes to exist through the words and deeds of its “representative,” who receives from the collective the paradoxical power to make it act as such but also to shape it - and even to betray it. This is what, borrow­ ing an expression from the scholastics, who liked to play on the sim­ ilarity between the two words, rooted in a common etymology that led them to be frequently confounded in medieval texts, Bourdieu calls the “mysterium of ministerium,” which one might translate in this context as the enigma of political office.11 The social technology of delegation by which the spokesperson officially speaks in the name of the group and in its stead, in effect becoming the group by giving it a personal incarnation, voice, and will, challenges the aggregative logic of the individual vote, which is near-universally seen as the touchstone of democracy but which Bourdieu contends is prejudicial to subordinate groups insofar as it forces them to enter into the polit­ ical game serially, in mechanical isolation, against a social order that is already constituted to their detriment. In chapter 4, Franck Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo complement Bourdieu’s two texts by offering a precise and comprehensive survey of his public interven­ tions over the span of his intellectual career. They map out the organic links between his political vision and his scientific positions that impelled him to practice a “Scholarship with Commitment,” from his early research on Algeria in the throes of colonial war to the unveil­ ing of the socially corrosive effects of policies of state retrenchment in Europe at the turn of the century. The next four chapters take up the key conceptual tools and methodological principles that Bourdieu offers for investigating

6

IN T R O D U C T IO N

democratic politics and apply them to its distinctive ingredients. In “Ancien Régime Ballots,” Olivier Christin re-historicizes the seem­ ingly timeless practice of voting by revealing the prevalence of elec­ tions during the absolutist age. Realizing that organic-collegial voting and individual-majoritarian voting overlapped and competed as alternative procedures of representation from the Renaissance to the French Revolution belies the hasty assimilation of voting to demo­ cratic suffrage and the unreflective belief in the invariance of social devices for decision making in civic affairs. In “Making the People Speak,” Patrick Champagne extends this questioning to the political uses of and reactions to public opinion polls. He discloses how producers, consumers, and commentators of polls have conquered a major role in the current division of political labor by playing on the rhetoric of scientificity and representativity to impose an un­ noticed transformation of that which they claim merely to measure: today “public opinion” is no longer the opinion of elected represen­ tatives, union and association leaders, and “opinion makers” such as intellectuals, as it was from the 1870s to the 1970s, but the artefactual product of the pairing of active pollsters and a demobilized and artificially atomized citizenry. Far from enhancing the voice of “the people,” the expanded place of polls in democratic life partakes of the general rationalization of public action that rein­ forces the exclusive control over state decisions by professionals of politics. In “Symbolic Power in the Rule of the ‘State Nobility’,” I argue that Bourdieu’s sociology of symbolic forms opens a new path for the comparative-historical anthropology of ruling class formation and state making. His analysis of the contribution of the field of elite schools to the legitimation of political and economic power in advanced society discloses how the social and mental integration of the diverse fractions of the ruling class reinforces class rule by estab­ lishing a pax dominorum recognizing the rival forms of capital they possess. It also exemplifies Bourdieu’s effort to dissolve the dualism of structure and agency and to craft a conception of power as an effect of the homologies of mental and social structures across criss­ crossing fields that diverges from Foucault’s in that it does not pre­ suppose the mediation of “discourse” and it recognizes that the social energy constitutive of species of capital is not “dispersed” through­ out the social body but accumulates in the field of power (rather than in the state per se). In chapter 8, Gil Eyal takes the conceptual doublet of field of power and political field to Eastern Europe. He deploys Bourdieu’s dynamic model of the relationship of social space and political struggles to explain how the electoral strategies and party

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7

maneuvers entailed in “The Making and Breaking of the Czecho­ slovak Political Field” after the collapse of the Soviet empire set off a dynamic of polarization that led to the eventual split between the Czech and the Slovak republics. Owing to its relative autonomy, the political field has the prismatic capacity to transpose, invert, and in some cases subvert the social divisions among the electorate, leading to unforeseen outcomes that attest to what Bourdieu calls the “sym­ bolic elasticity” of the social world. The book closes by shifting from the national to the global level to probe the manifestations and mechanisms of a novel form of sym­ bolic colonization of which academics are at once perpetrators and victims. “The Cunning of Imperialist Reason” poses the question of the social and intellectual conditions for a genuine social-scientific internationalism through an analysis of the worldwide spread of a neoliberal “newspeak” forged through the uncontrolled universal­ ization of the folk concepts and preoccupations of American society and university. The terms, themes, and tropes of this emerging plan­ etary lingua franca - “multiculturalism,” “globalization,” “frag­ mentation,” “race,” “underclass,” “minority,” “identity,” etc. - tend to project and impose on all societies the concerns and viewpoints of the United States intelligentsia, thereby transfigured into tools of analysis and yardsticks for policy fit for naturalizing the peculiar his­ torical experience of one peculiar society, tacitly instituted as a model for all of humankind. This chapter suggests that the logic of the inter­ national circulation of ideas, the internal transformations of the academic field and its growing subjection to market criteria, the strategies of foundations and publishers, as well as of local collabo­ rators in global conceptual “import-export” converge to foster a par­ ticularly pernicious form of cultural imperialism that amputates our ability to make out the limitations and possibilities of contemporary politics. It seems fitting to conclude with a text dealing with the perils of symbolic power inside the academic world that has triggered lively controversy and discussion in a number of countries, since the aim of the present volume is precisely to stimulate its readers to grapple with and gauge Bourdieu’s multi-sided contributions to the theory and practice of democratic politics, of which open intellectual debate is a crucial component. It is the collective hope of the contributors to this book (which is being published near-simultaneously in half a dozen languages) that it will, at minimum, illustrate and propagate Bourdieu’s admonition that “it is worth fighting for the recognition of the universal right to speak, and to speak to ensure the return of the socially repressed.”12

8

INTR OD UC TIO N

N o te s

I would like to express my gratitude to Andrew Arato and Nancy Fraser for entrusting me with guest-editing the special issue of Constellations: An International Journal o f Critical and Democratic Theory (vol. 11, no. 1, Spring 2004) that served as the template for this book, and to Blackwell Publishers for permission to reprint its contents in a different form here as chapters 1-6; to the contributors of this volume who (with one exception regretfully missing in action) all produced their pieces with diligence and responded with equal precision and flexibility to the suggestions of their edi­ torial taskmaster; to Richard Nice and James Ingram for their efficient assistance with the thankless yet essential mission of translation; and to Sarah Sancy for her contribution to final editing. My appreciation goes also to Marie-Christine Rivière at the Collège de France for her unfailing help from across one continent and one ocean and to Jérome Bourdieu for his early backing of this project. Finally, I thank John Thompson for his enthu­ siastic support of this publishing endeavor from the moment I disclosed it to him in New York City and for seeing it to press promptly. 1 Pierre Bourdieu, “Penser la politique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 71-2 (March 1988): 2. 2 Ibid., p. 3. 3 This radical historicization applies to reason, truth, and the law, and a fortiori to politics and democracy: “In the beginning, there is only custom, that is, the historical arbitrary of the historical institution that makes itself be forgotten as such by striving to found itself in mythical reason, as with the theories of contract, these veritable myths of origin of the democratic religions” (Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity, 2000 [1997]), p. 94, my trans.). 4 “The silence over the conditions that place citizens, all the more bru­ tally as they are more deprived economically and culturally, before the alternatives of abdication through abstention and dispossession through delegation is to ‘political science’ what the silence over the economic and cultural conditions of ‘rational’ economic conduct is to economic science” (Pierre Bourdieu, “Political Representation: Elements for a Theory of the Political Field,” in Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity, 1991 [1982, this essay 1981]), p. 171, my trans.). 5 Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, pp. 182-8. 6 Ibid., pp. 188-91. 7 Ibid., p. 185. Elsewhere Bourdieu reminds us that whether something is political and worthy of collective action aimed at redress is itself an object of political contention as, in all social confrontations, “the stake o f the struggle is a stake o f struggle: at every moment there is a struggle to determine whether or not it is ‘proper’ or not to struggle

SYMBOLIC POWER A N D D E M O C R A T IC PRACTICE

8 9 10

11

12

9

over such and such issue” (Pierre Bourdieu, “Strike and Political Action,” in his Sociology in Question (London: Sage, 1990 [1980]), p. F258). Pierre Bourdieu, InterventioJis, 1961-2001. Science sociale et action politique (Montréal: Comeau & Nadeau, 2002), p. 163. Bourdieu, Sociology in Question, p. 18. This chapter also typifies two key features of Bourdieu’s approach to politics, and of his sociology more generally, that refute a certain conventional reading of his work as static and mechanical (as in the scholarly fable the “reproduction theorist”): the inseparability of the structural and the historical modes of analysis, and the keen attention accorded to disjuncture and contradiction. Mysterium is Latin for the ancient Greek mustèrion originally meaning “secret rite” and referring later to something unexplained or unex­ plainable, while ministerium evolved to mean service, office, trade, or craft (under the spelling misterium). Pierre Bourdieu, “Le droit à la parole,” interview in he Monde, 11-12 October 1977; repr. in Interventions, p. 107.

I Pointers on Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics Loïc Wacquant

We underestimate the properly political power to change social life by changing the representation of social life and by putting a modicum of imagination in power. Pierre Bourdieu, “Donner la parole aux gens sans parole” (1977) Pierre Bourdieu has rarely been read as a political sociologist or philosopher.1 And yet there is a sense in which his oeuvre as well as much of his intellectual activity represents a sustained, multi-pronged attempt to chisel out a science of the social conditions of possibility of democracy - broadly defined as that social state wherein everyone would possess both the inclination and the ability to take matters political into her own hands - and to detect the historical pitfalls and possibilities of the struggles aimed at fostering its advance in differ­ ent realms of life. The epicentral place that the notion of symbolic power and that issues of representation, delegation, nomination, and (mis)recognition occupy in Bourdieu’s works suggest that the latter constitute a major untapped store of concepts, theories, and insights for rethinking the links between freedom, justice, and politics, as well as a useful guide for action aimed at solidifying them. It is useful, to elucidate the vexed relation of Bourdieu to the question of democratic politics, to distinguish, if only for the sake of analytical clarity, between three tightly interwoven elements: (i) the personal political views of the individual Pierre Bourdieu, which are pertinent insofar as they animate his scientific practice and civic

POINTERS O N BO URD IE U A N D D E M O C R A T IC POLITICS

I I

engagements; (ii) politics as encountered in his sociological writings, or how he treats the official institutions that compose the public sphere of liberal democracies, parties and unions, parliaments and polls, the media and the state, as objects of social-scientific inquiry; and, last but not least, (iii) the politics o / Bourdieu’s works, that is, the role he assigns to science and intellectuals in democratic battles, and the implications and uses of his thought in and for the gamut of power struggles ranging from intimate gender battles on the home front to the cross-continental mass mobilization against the neolib­ eral revolution sweeping through the globe today. A brief considera­ tion of each of these elements helps set the stage for this book bringing together chapters that variously explicate theoretically and extend empirically Bourdieu’s conception of democracy and demon­ strate the heuristic potency of his theory of symbolic power as applied to organized politics in liberal societies.

The Personal Politics of Pierre Bourdieu From early on in his youth, Bourdieu was consistently a man of the left - of the “gauche de gauche,” as he famously put it in a biting criticism of the rightward turn and renunciations of the Socialist Party in the mid-nineties, an expression that has since become a stan­ dard phrase of French political language.2 Fie owed this proclivity to his upbringing in a remote rural region of southwestern France where support for socialist ideals ran strong amidst the ambient conser­ vatism, as did sympathy for the frente popular during the Spanish Civil War and the Communist-led Resistance to German occupation during World War II.3 Ffis father was the son of an itinerant share­ cropper who, although he had left school at 14, rose at mid-life to become the postman of the tiny mountain village where Bourdieu spent his childhood. Fie was a union member and voted far on the left.4 He instilled in little Pierre an abiding respect for “regular folks” - which in this isolated locale meant small peasants, farm laborers, craftsmen, and shopkeepers - and an acute sensitivity to social (in)justice as well as admiration for the great figures of the French Republican Left, Robespierre, Jean Jaurès, and Léon Blum, who had inspired the civic vision of the Durkheimians a half-century earlier.5 The father had an anarchist and rebellious streak, which he also bequeathed to his only son. This initial left propensity, buttressed by a strong regional culture that valorizes restiveness towards authority, was powerfully rein-

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forced by Bourdieu’s experience as an ethnic and class outsider in the affluent milieu of the elite high school in Paris where he completed his secondary education on a government scholarship and later at the École normale supérieure of the Rue d’Ulm, where he received his training in philosophy among the cream of France’s young minds in the early fifties. There he gravitated towards schoolmates and teach­ ers (such as Georges Canguilhem) who, like him, were of lower social extraction and provincial provenance, which correlates strongly with left political leanings. But, unlike most students of his generation, Bourdieu did not join the Communist Party then hegemonic on the intellectual scene.6 Indeed, he was repelled by Stalinist sectarianism and never in his life took up membership in an established political organization, party, union, or civic association. He had acquired during his stint as a boarder in the public lycée of Pau a keen sense of the structural duplicity, even hypocrisy, that warps official institu­ tions. This initial anti-institutional disposition was confirmed by witnessing first-hand - and studying sociologically - the horrors of French colonial policy during the Algerian War of Independence,7 and it only grew stronger over the ensuing decades. Filtered through his personal dispositions, the Algerian tragedy is what led Bourdieu to convert from philosophy to anthropology and thence to sociology: seeing the destruction and suffering wrought by the dual cataclysm of capitalist imperialism and military confronta­ tion touched him to his core and determined him to engage in empir­ ical research intended as a form o f “political pedagogy,” as he put it in his self-socioanalysis: “I would try to tell the French, and espe­ cially to people on the Left, what was really going on in a country about which they often knew next to nothing - once again, in order to be of some use, and perhaps also to stave off the bad conscience of the helpless witness of an abominable war.”8 But once he tried his hand at social inquiry, he never stopped. This urge to pour the “cold water” of sociological analytics on the most burning social issues of the period would never leave him and reinforced his proclivity to adopting independent political views rooted in firm empirical knowl­ edge of the question at hand. Thus Bourdieu always engaged with politics, but from a principled “sniper’s position,” so to speak, anchored by a commitment to science and to maintaining his inde­ pendence from organized outfits, which he viewed as a sine qua non of scientific work. In May 1981, when the Socialist Party rose to power for the first time under France’s Fifth Republic, he was already staunchly in the left opposition to Mitterrand - his forewarnings about the latter’s corrupt ways and the rightward tilt of the Socialist Party were later to prove premonitory. Through the eighties, he repeatedly defended

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the “libertarian tradition of the Left” against the “governmental Left” willing to curtail debate, smother critique, and reduce policy options in deference to the organizational necessities of party disci­ pline and state management.9 In the nineties, he sought to put the competencies of social science at the service of a decentralized network of democratic struggles spearheaded by a new wave of pro­ gressive associations and “coordinations” bypassing traditional agencies of social protest such as the converging mobilizations of the “sans” (those “without”: the job less, homeless, and paper less migrants) and the emerging transnational currents fighting the spread of neoliberal globalization. Some were surprised by the vigor of his public involvement in worldly politics in the wake of the publication of La Misère du monde10 and the wide-ranging social and political reactions it triggered - after the founding of the militant academic group Raisons d’agir in 1996 and the launching of a publishing house that year, the rumor in Paris even had it that Bourdieu was about to run for office. But, in reality, from his youthful days as an appren­ tice anthropologist vivisecting the Algerian war to his path-breaking sociology of the contribution of culture to the perpetuation of class inequality at the start of the era of university expansion to his later public condemnations of the social wreckage left by policies of market deregulation and social retrenchment, Bourdieu continually fused scientific inquiry and political activism.11 Doing social science was always for him an indirect way of doing politics: what changed over time is the dosage of those two elements and the degree of sci­ entific sublimation of his political pulsions.

Dem ocratic Politics in Bourdieu’s W o rk Aside from his analysis of the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria and conflicts over education in the era of mass schooling, Pierre Bourdieu’s first writings trained squarely on democratic politics date from the launching of the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales in 1975. They comprise a first cluster centered on ruling-class ideology, the culture-politics link, and the workings o f the political field.12 In a book-length article on “The Production of Dominant Ideol­ ogy” published two years after Giscard d’Estaing’s entrance into the Élysée Palace, Bourdieu mapped out the “common places” and “neutral sites” constitutive of the new social philosophy of a “recon­ verted conservatism” painted in the soothing colors of human progress, technoscientific reason, and measured change stamped by

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optimistic evolutionism. He showed this new vision of and for power to be “a discourse without subject whose primary function is to express and produce the logical and moral integration of the dom­ inant class.”13 In “Questions of Politics,” Bourdieu turned his sights toward the other end of the social spectrum to demonstrate that the “no responses” of opinion polls and abstentions in elections have a deeply political meaning: they reveal that the ability to proffer a properly political expression in the public sphere, far from being uni­ versally given to all, is contingent upon possessing “the socially rec­ ognized competency and the sentiment of being founded to do so.” 14 This argument, pointing to the social, economic, and cultural con­ ditions of possibility of routine democratic practice that official political science takes for granted, was reworked in the chapter on “Culture and Politics” in Distinction, where Bourdieu revealed a homology between the space of social positions and the space of posi­ tion-takings in the political arena, albeit at the cost of a “systematic deformation,” and spotlighted the opposition between two modali­ ties of political expression:15 whereas among the working class politi­ cal judgements stem from the ethical springs of the class ethos in continuity with everyday reasoning, among the bourgeoisie they result from use of a properly political cipher applied to the special­ ized stances of political debate. The “radical discontinuity” between “ethos and logos, the practi­ cal mastery and the verbal mastery” of the political game16 made urgent the analysis of the functioning of the microcosm of represen­ tative politics. In “Political Representation: Elements for a Theory of the Political Field,” Bourdieu supplied both an anatomy of the semiautonomous world within which specialized agents and institutions vie to offer “politically effective and legitimate forms of perception and expression to ordinary citizens reduced to the status of con­ sumers,” and one of the first full-scale exemplifications of his dis­ tinctive concept of “champ,”17 Analysis of the functioning of parties and parliaments suggests that the fundamental antinomy of demo­ cratic politics is that the act of delegation, whereby professional politicians are entrusted with the expression of the will of their con­ stituents but pursue strategies aimed chiefly at one another, is always pregnant with the possibility of dispossession and even usurpation, and all the more so as the group represented is more deprived of eco­ nomic and cultural capital.18 It also discloses that [tlhe political field is one of the privileged sites for the exercise of the power o f representation or manifestation [in the sense of public demonstration - trans.] that contributes to making what existed in a

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practical state, tacitly or implicitly, exist fully, that is, in the objecti­ fied state, in a form directly visible to all, public, published, official and thus authorized.19

The role of the political field as theater for the performative rep­ resentation of the social world leads to the second major node of Bourdieu’s political sociology: namely, the issues of authoritative nomination and the symbolic fabrication o f collectives, be they fam­ ilies, classes, ethnic groups, regions, nations, or genders.20 Against the latent economism that leads us “to underestimate the efficacy of this dimension of every power that is symbolic power,” Bourdieu asserts that “social science must encompass within the theory of the social world a theory of the theory effect,”21 that is, take full account of the fact that social reality is in good measure the product of a collective work of cognitive construction that operates in the ordinary encoun­ ters of everyday life as well as in the fields of cultural production and in “the clashes of visions and predictions of the properly political struggle” through which a definite conception of the pertinent “divi­ sions of the social world” obtains.22 But, against approaches that absolutize language and seek in the immanent features of communi­ cation the springs of its power to shape reality, Bourdieu argues that “the mystery of performative magic resolves itself in the mystery of the ministry,” that is, in the “alchemy of representation (in the dif­ ferent senses of the term) whereby the representative makes the group that makes him.”23 The efficacy of performative discourse is directly proportional to the authority of the agent who enunciates it and to its degree of congruence with the objective partitions of society: this Bourdieu demonstrates in Language and Symbolic Power through a series of case studies in “sociological pragmatics” on religious cere­ mony, scholarly myth, philosophical argumentation, and the “rites of institution” whereby salient social distinctions are absolutized by “solemn acts of categorization” overlaying them with the collective assent of the group.24 It is under this heading that one may put Bourdieu’s influential analysis of the political uses and social effects of public opinion polls as a modality of “expression” of the will of “the people” supple­ menting, complicating, and even rivaling the two other major means of popular voice in liberal democracy that are elections and street demonstrations. In “Public Opinion Does Not Exist,” Bourdieu ques­ tions the three tacit tenets at the basis of polls, namely, that every­ one can and does have an opinion, that all opinions are equal, and that there exists a prior consensus on the questions worthy of being posed, to argue that “public opinion” as presented in the form of

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spot survey statistics in newspapers “is a pure and simple artefact whose function is to dissimulate the fact that the state of the opinion at a given moment is a system of forces, of tensions.”25 Polls are an instrument not of political knowledge but of political action whose widespread use tends to devalue other means of group making such as strikes, demonstrations, or the very elections whose formally egal­ itarian aggregative logic they ostensibly mimic. Like voting, they are not a mere technical means for facilitating democratic expression but a fully social technology whose deployment profoundly transforms the tacit rules and unseen regularities of the political game.26 A third major contribution of Bourdieu to the sociology and phi­ losophy of democratic politics clusters around his theory of the field o f power and o f the state as the agency that “successfully claims monopoly over the legitimate use” not only of “material violence” as Max Weber famously proposed - but also of symbolic violence. The notion of field of power was elaborated by Bourdieu in the course of historical inquiries into the genesis and functioning of the artistic field in nineteenth-century France and through a series of m ono­ graphic studies of top corporations, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, juridical authority, the higher civil service, and elite schools that posed concretely the problem of the conflict between different forms of power.27 To escape the substantialism and misplaced realism inherent in the concept of “ruling class,” Bourdieu sketches the con­ stellation of interlinked institutions within which the holders of various species of capital (economic, religious, legal, scientific, aca­ demic, artistic, etc.) vie to impose the supremacy of the particular kind of power they wield. This struggle for the imposition of the dominant principle of domina­ tion, which leads at every moment to a state of equilibrium in the sharing of powers, that is to say, to a division of the labor o f domi­ nation (sometimes willed and conceived as such, and explicitly nego­ tiated), is also a struggle over the legitimate principle of legitimation and, inseparably, over the legitimate mode of reproduction of the foun­ dations of domination. It can take the form of actual confrontations (as with the “palace wars” or armed struggles between temporal and spiritual power-holders) or symbolic confrontations (such as those in the Middle Ages whose stake was the precedence of oratores over bellatores, or the struggles that played out throughout the nineteenth century, and continuing today, over the preeminence of merit over heredity or talent).28 Anchored in the polar opposition between economic and cultural capital personified by the antagonism between the capitalist and

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the artist, the field of power coalesced as a result of structural dif­ ferentiation fostering the emergence of a plurality of relatively autonomous fields each governed by its own laws. This differentia­ tion opened up the space within which jurists attached to the dynas­ tic state gradually carved out room for themselves and created the “bureaucratic field,” i.e., the set of impersonal public institutions offi­ cially devoted to serving the citizenry and laying claim to authorita­ tive nomination and classification29 - as with the granting of credentials (for positive sociodicy) and the bestowing of penal marks (for negative sociodicy). This reconceptualization of the state as the central “bank of symbolic capital guaranteeing all acts of authority” situated at the barycenter of the field of power allows Bourdieu to break with the unitary vision of “the state” as an organizational monolith and to link the internal divisions and struggles it harbors - exemplified by the running conflict between its “right hand,” entrusted with the maintenance of the economic and legal order, and its “left hand,” charged with the sustenance of the dispossessed and the provision of public goods 0 - to the forces traversing social space. It also enables him to show that what are often taken to be political clashes between the dominant and subordinate classes are often collisions among dif­ ferent categories of the dominant (e.g., state managers versus corpo­ rate owners) and between the different modes of reproduction of capital that each favors, specifically school-mediated acquisition versus hereditary transmission.31 And it suggests that the state does not exist only “out there,” in the guise of bureaucracies, authorities, and ceremonies: it also lives “in here,” ineffaceably engraved in all of us in the form of the state-sanctioned mental categories acquired via schooling through which we cognitively construct the social world, so that we already consent to its dictates prior to committing any “political” act.32 Finally, Bourdieu argues that the “lengthening of the chain of legitimation” attendant upon the establishment of the bureaucratic state and the contention between differentiated forms of capital introduces the possibility of “diverting” strategies of univer­ salization to put them at the service of progressive goals: as the divi­ sion of labor of domination grows more complex, as more competing agents (jurists, priests, scientists, civil servants, politicians, etc.) invoke civic disinterestedness to advance their specific interests, they create opportunities for the universal to advance.33 Bourdieu’s tools for the analysis of democratic politics have been borrowed, deployed, and amended in wide-ranging historical, anthropological, sociological, and politological research.34 To stay in France, an important strand of political science led by Bernard

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Lacroix, Daniel Gaxie, and Michel Offerlé has dented the establish­ ment with the help of Bourdieu’s theories and produced a wealth of original studies of the core institutions of representative democracy, parties, voting, polls, and demonstrations.35 But they have also been put into action, by Bourdieu himself and others, in the concrete strug­ gles of the day.

Im plications o f B o u rd ieu ’s T h e o rie s fo r D e m o c ra tic Struggles

Bourdieu was always acutely aware of the implications of his research for democratic politics and keen to disseminate its results to foster progressive transformation. Over the decades, he wrote, lectured, and consulted extensively on the practical teachings of his inquiries on colonial Algeria and rural change, education and pedagogy, access to the arts and television, housing policy and market deregulation, racism and discrimination, science and European integration, among other topics.36 Indeed, along with the accumulation of scientific capital that gave weight to his interventions, one of the springs of his increased activism in the public sphere over time was a clearer real­ ization of the applied ramifications of his analyses as the advances of his theories of habitus, field, and symbolic power gave him greater purchase on the workings of the institutions he sought to act upon or with.37 Bourdieu also continually revised and refocused his analyses to capture extant political developments and the new threats directed at the democratic conquests of social movements. For instance, in the nineties the research line initiated two decades earlier by the study of ruling-class ideology was extended - as well as thoroughly revamped, in particular by jettisoning the notion of ideology altogether - by the study of the planetary diffusion of the “newspeak” of neoliberalism as the latest avatar of “the cunning of imperialist reason.”38 The effort to elucidate the transnational economy of symbolic exchanges so as to foster a Realpolitik of reason at the European if not the global level39 was complemented by the dissection of the “Stranglehold of the Journalistic Field”40 disclosing how the mainstream media feed the generalized drift towards com­ modification by reinforcing the weight of those favoring the “com­ mercial over the pure,” submission to market demand over the independent commands of the craft, in all the realms they touch, whether it be literature, art, philosophy, science, television, or poli­ tics itself.

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The first practical implication of Bourdieu’s sociology of politics is to formulate anew the possible role o f intellectuals in contempo­ rary struggles. Based on a historical reconstruction of the institu­ tionalization of the category from Voltaire to Zola to Sartre,41 Bourdieu argues that, far from being antinomic (as academic “pro­ fessionalism” would have it), intellectual autonomy and civic engage­ ment can and must be joined in a synergistic relationship such that scientists, writers, and artists increase the efficacy of their political interventions in and through the vigorous defense of their independ­ ence from economic and political powers.42 But to counter the rising influence of “experts” and think tanks which put technocratic science at the service of an increasingly rationalized mode of domination, cul­ tural producers must move beyond the model of the “total intellec­ tual” incarnated by Jean-Paul Sartre and of the “specific intellectual” favored by Foucault to create a “collective intellectual,” through the pooling of the complementary competencies of scientific analysis and creative communication, capable of bringing the most rigorous prod­ ucts of research to bear on salient public debates in a continuous and organized manner - as Raisons d’agir sought to do on its scale on the European political scene.43 This collective intellectual has two urgent missions, on the defensive and offensive fronts, respectively. The one is to “produce and disseminate instruments of defense against symbolic domination” and in particular against the imposi­ tion of the prepackaged problematics of established politics, such as are surreptitiously conveyed by the lingua franca of neoliberalism (with its endlessly reiterated invocation of “globalization,” “frag­ mentation,” “identity,” “community,” “multiculturalism,” “gover­ nance,” etc., which masks the sources and structures of the new inequalities); the other is to contribute to “the work of political inven­ tion” necessary to renew critical thought and to enable it to marry sociological realism with civic utopianism.44 A second important teaching of Bourdieu’s inquiries for demo­ cratic practice is that political action must target not only institutions (i.e., historical systems of positions objectified in the public sphere) but also dispositions (schemata of perception, appreciation, and action deposited inside social agents). For genuine and lasting pro­ gressive change to occur, a politics of fields aimed at structured power relations must of necessity be supplemented by a politics o f habitus paying close attention to the social production and modalities of expression of political proclivities. This is because [s]ymbolic action cannot, by itself, and outside of any transformation of the conditions of production and reinforcement of dispositions,

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extirpate embodied beliefs, passions, and pulsions that remain thor­ oughly indifferent to the injunctions or condemnations of humanistic universalism (itself also rooted in dispositions and beliefs).45 Politics becomes a more complicated and more intimate affair once one realizes that adherence to the existing order operates primarily not through the mediation of ideas and ideals, language games and ideo­ logical conviction, but through the “double naturalization” of the social world “resulting from its inscription in things and in bodies,” and through the silent and invisible agreement between social struc­ tures and mental structures.46 This is particularly true of the “passions of the dominated habitus (from the standpoint of gender, culture, or language), somatized social relation, law of the social body converted into the law of the physical body,” which for that very reason “cannot be suspended by a mere awakening of consciousness.”47 Yet our soci­ eties marked by the proliferation of “situations of maladjustment” between habitus and world, due to the generalization of access to edu­ cation and the spread of social insecurity, offer a fertile terrain for polit­ ical interventions aimed at fracturing the doxic acceptance of the status quo and fostering the collective realization of alternative historical futures: “The belief that such and such future, desired or feared, is pos­ sible, probable or inevitable, can, in certain conjunctures, mobilize around itself a whole group and thus contribute to fostering or pre­ venting the coming of that future.”48 Politics consists precisely in playing off and with this “looseness in the correspondence between subjective hopes and objective chances” so as “to introduce a margin of liberty between them.” Taking after Blaise Pascal, Bourdieu’s philosophical anthropology conceives of humans as beings “devoid of raison d’être, inhabited by the need for justification” that only the judgment of others can grant.49 This means that, far from being a novel development linked to the rise of “cultural diversity” in advanced societies, the politics o f recognition have always been with us: they are intrinsic to the human condition. Issues of redistribution are inseparable from ques­ tions of dignitas insofar as social existence arises in and through dis­ tinction which necessarily assigns to each a differential social status and worth. And because the symbolic war of all against all never ends, there can be no political claim, no matter how coarsely mate­ rial, that does not enclose a demand for social acknowledgment.50 Here Bourdieu complicates current debates on deliberative democ­ racy by suggesting that the quest for cultural recognition, recently proposed by prominent political philosophers as the aim of a more progressive politics suited to the age of increased migration and in-

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cipient ethnic fragmentation, is an expression of the “scholastic bias” of academics who, projecting their hermeneutic relationship to the social world, forget that every relation of meaning is also a relation of force:51 culture is always an instrument of vision and di-vision, at once a product, a weapon, and a stake of struggles for symbolic life and death - and for this reason it cannot be the means to resolve the running battle for access to recognized social existence that every­ where defines and ranks humanity. So much to remind us that the imperative of reflexivity, which is essential to Bourdieu’s conception of social science, applies equally to politics: intellectuals must con­ tinually turn their instruments of knowledge onto themselves in order to detect and control the manifold ways in which their posture as lectores, and the interests and strategies they pursue as independent cul­ tural producers within the specific order of the intellectual field, shapes their construction of “the people” and their interpretation of the interests of citizens in liberal democracy.52 A final political implication of Bourdieu’s agonistic conception of the social world, as suffused by relations of domination ultimately anchored in the necessarily unequal distribution of symbolic capital and the inescapable dialectic of distinction and pretension it activates, is that democracy is best conceived not as an affirmative state - of formal equality, equal capacity, or shared freedoms - but as a his­ torical process of active negation of social negation, a never-ending effort to make social relations less arbitrary, institutions less unjust, distributions of resources and options less imbalanced, recognition less scarce. And for this Bourdieu supplies a general principle of polit­ ical engagement: first to acknowledge that the conditions of access to political expression are not universally granted a priori to all (as typ­ ically postulated by political philosophy and political science) but that, on the contrary, they are socially determined and differentially allocated; and then to work to universalize the ability and the propen­ sity to act and think politically, that is, to universalize realistic means of gaining access to that particular historical embodiment of the uni­ versal that is democratic politics as we know it.

Notes 1 With the exception of Germany and Latin America, where several col­ lections of Bourdieu’s dispersed essays on politics and intellectuals have fostered close readings of his views on power and democracy (see, for Germany, the volume of original pieces edited by Uwe H. Bittlingmayer, Jens Kastner, and Claudia Rademacher under the telling title Theorie

22

2

3

4 5

6 7

8

9 10 11

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als Kampf? Zur politischen Soziologie Pierre Bourdieus (Opladen: Leske and Budrich, 2002)), and Russia, where Natalia Schmatko edited a selection of Bourdieu’s articles entitled Sociology o f Politics (Moscow: Socio-Logos, 1993). In the Anglo-American world, appropriations of Bourdieu’s political sociology have tended to bunch up on the empiri­ cal side, but see George Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Orville Lee, “Culture and Democratic Theory: Toward a Theory of Symbolic Democracy,” Constellations 5, no. 4 (December 1998): 433-55; and Keith Topper, “Not So Trifling Nuances: Pierre Bourdieu, Symbolic Violence, and the Perversions of Democracy,” Constellations 8, no. 1 (March 2001): 30-56. Pierre Bourdieu, Interventions, 1961-2001. Science sociale et action politique, ed. Franck Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo (Montréal: Comeau Sc Nadeau, 2002), pp. 361-4. Pierre Bourdieu, “Erinnerung ohne Gedanken,” in Von Vergessen vom Gedenken, ed. H. L. Arnold Sauzay and R. von Tadden (Göttingen: Wellstein, 1995), pp. 42-7. Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse pour une auto-analyse (Paris: Raisons d ’agir Éditions, Cours et travaux, 2004), pp. 110-12. See Pierre Bourdieu, Le Bal des célibataires. Crise de la société paysanne en Béarn (Paris: Seuil/Points, 2002), for an ethnographie portrait and analysis of the social structure and contradictions of his native Béarn, and Emile Durkheim, Lettres à Marcel Mauss (Paris: Presses Universi­ taires de France, 1998), for abundant testimony to the centrality of Republican socialism to the formation of the French School of sociology. Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity, 1990 [1987]; rev. edn. 1994), p. 13. Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad, Le Déracinement. La crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1964); Bourdieu, Interventions, pp. 17-42. Pierre Bourdieu, “Algerian Landing,” Ethnography 5, no. 4 (December 2004): in press. The life-transformative impact of the encounter with colonial Algeria is well-documented in the testimonies gathered in the special issue of Awal. Cahiers d ’études berbères, no. 27-8 (2003), ed. Tassadit Yacine, on “L’autre Bourdieu.” Bourdieu, Interventions, pp. 165-9. Pierre Bourdieu et al., The Weight o f the World: Social Suffering in Con­ temporary Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1999 [1993]). This synergistic relation between scientific inquiry and political activism is demonstrated by Franck Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo, “Scholar­ ship with Commitment,” chapter 4 in this volume, but more so by a close reading of the volume of Bourdieu’s collected public interventions from 1961 to 2001 they edited, Interventions. This argument is made from a different vantage point by Bourdieu’s intellectual “comrade in

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13

14 15

16 17

18

19 20

23

arms” at the Collège de France, the analytic philosopher Jacques Bouveresse, in his Bourdieu, savant et politique (Paris: Hachette, 2004), esp. ch. 5. In what follows, I signpost the main thematic nodes in Bourdieu’s treat­ ment of democratic politics, with reference only to pivotal pieces, without tracing the numerous transversal queries that tie them tightly together. The interested reader can pursue these themes further by fol­ lowing the paths indicated by the abbreviated bibliographic guide at the end of the book. All quotations of Bourdieu’s texts are my (^transla­ tions from the French. Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski, “La production de l’idéologie domi­ nante,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 2/3 (June 1976): 4. Here Bourdieu formulated within a Durkheimian framework an argu­ ment made famous later within the Marxist lineage by Nicholas Aber­ crombie, Bryan S. Turner, and Stephen Hill in The Dominant Ideology Thesis (London: Routledge, 1984). Pierre Bourdieu, “Questions de politique,” Actes de la recherche en sci­ ences sociales 16 (June 1977): 64. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984 [1979J). The “trans­ lation” of social into political positions effected by the prismatic filter­ ing of the political field is elaborated by Gil Eyal, “The Making and Breaking of the Czechoslovak Political Field,” chapter 8 in this volume. Distinction, p. 537. Pierre Bourdieu, “Political Representation: Elements for a Theory of the Political Field,” in Language and Symbolic Power, ed. and intr. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Polity, 1991 [1982, this essay 1981]), p. 172. It is not by happenstance that this article was sandwiched between those on the scientific field (1975) and on the religious field (1971, 1982). For Bourdieu, these three universes are similar in that they are based on a radical disjuncture between the profane and the specialists who claim monopoly over the manipulation of three essential goods: scientific truth, spiritual salvation, and civic virtue. “By a strange irony, the concentration of political capital is never so great. . . as in the case of those parties that have for goal to struggle against the concentration of economic capital” (ibid., p. 215). Ibid., p. 235. Pierre Bourdieu, “Capital symbolique et classes sociales,” L’Arc 72 (1978): 13-19; idem,“Le mort saisit le vif: les relations entre l’histoire incorporée et l’histoire réifiée,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 32-3 (April-June 1980): 3-14; idem, “Delegation and Political Fetishism,” Thesis Eleven 10/11 (November 1985 [1984]): 56-70 (repr. in Language and Symbolic Power, pp. 203-19); idem. Masculine Dom­ ination (Cambridge: Polity, 2002 [1998]). An extension of Bourdieu’s germinal essay on the family as the primordial political collective of

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modern society (“The Family as Realized Category,” Theory, Culture, and Society 13, no. 3 (July 1996 [1993]): 9-26 (abridged as “The Family Spirit,” in Practical Reasons: On the Theory o f Action (Cambridge: Polity, 1998 [1994]), pp. 64-74), is Remi Lenoir’s provocative analysis of the historical forms of “familialism” since the Middle Ages; Généalogie de la morale familiale (Paris: Seuil, 2003). 21 Bourdieu, Interventions, p. 102. 22 Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, p. 106. For a historical illustration and analytic extension of this position, see Rogers Brubaker, Reframing Nationalism: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and idem. Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 23 Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, p. 106, and idem, “The Mystery of Ministry: From Particular Wills to the General Will” [2001], chapter 3 in this volume. 24 Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, pp. 120-1. 25 Pierre Bourdieu, “Public Opinion Does Not Exist,” in Communication and Class Struggle, ed. A. Matelart and S. Siegelaub (New York: Inter­ national General/IMMRC, 1979 [1971]), p. 224; see also “Remarques à propos de la valeur scientifique et des effets politiques des enquêtes d’opinion,” Pouvoirs 33 (April 1985): 131-9 (trans. in In Other Words (1987) as “Opinion Polls: A ‘Science’ without a Scientist,” pp. 168-75). The purpose and impact of the 1971 essay are discussed by Patrick Champagne, “‘Making the People Speak’,” chapter 6 in this volume. 26 The incipient conflict of legitimacy between voting and polling, and their joint opposition to street demonstration as a means of symbolic group-making, is analyzed at length by Patrick Champagne, Faire Popinion. Le nouveau jeu politique (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1990). The historical variability and hidden social presuppositions of voting are addressed by Olivier Christin, “Ancien Régime Ballots,” chapter 5 in this volume. 27 These studies were published between 1971 and 1996, and their main results are encapsulated in The Rules o f Art: Genesis and Structure o f the Artistic Field (Cambridge: Polity, 1996 [1992]), The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field o f Power (Cambridge: Polity, 1996 [1989]), and Bourdieu’s unpublished course at the Collège de France from the early 1990s on the invention of the state. The meaning and anatomy of the “field of power” are mapped out further in Loïc Wacquant, “Sym­ bolic Power in the Rule of the ‘State Nobility’,” chapter 7 in this volume. 28 Bourdieu, The State Nobility, p. 376. 29 Pierre Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State: On the Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” Sociological Theory 12, no. 1 (March 1994 [1993]): 1-19; abridged version repr. in Practical Reasons, pp. 35-63.

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Bourdieu et al., Weight of the World; idem, Interventions, pp. 245-52. Bourdieu, “From the King’s House to the Reason of State: A Model of the Genesis of the Bureaucratic Field” [1997 j, chapter 2 in this volume. 32 “The construction of the state goes hand in hand with the construction of a sort of shared historical transcendental that, as a result of a pro­ tracted process of embodiment, becomes immanent to all its ‘subjects’. Through the frameworks it imposes upon practices, the state institutes and inculcates common symbolic forms of thought, statist forms of clas­ sification. . , . The state thereby creates the conditions of an immediate orchestration of habitus that is itself the foundation of a consensus on this set of shared self-evidences constitutive of common sense” (Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity, 2000 [1997]), p. 175). 33 Bourdieu, The State Nobility, pp. 558-9. 34 For a sample from among the issues of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales published in the past decade alone, see “Politiques” (91/2, March 1992), “Strategies of Reproduction and the Transmission of Powers” (105, December 1994), “Literature and Politics” (111/12, March 1996), “Violences” (120, December 1997), and “Votes” (140, December 2001); and on the state more specifically, “The History of the State” (116/17, March 1997), “Genesis of the Modern State” (118, June 1997), “From Social State to Penal State” (124, September 1998), and “State Science” (133, June 2000). The varied uses of Bourdieu’s theory of the political field include David Stark and Laszlo Bruszt on democratization and economic change in post-Soviet Eastern Europe (Postsocialist Pathways: Trans­ forming Politics and Property in East Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)), Raka Ray on women’s movements in urban India (Fields o f Protest: Women's Movements in India (Min­ neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)), Robert W. Hefner on Islam and democracy in Indonesia (Civil Islajn: Muslims and Democ­ ratization in Indonesia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)), Gil Eyal on the breakup of Czechoslovakia (The Origins of Postcom­ munist Elites: From the Prague Spring to the Breakup of Czechoslova­ kia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)), Javier Auyero on popular protests against official corruption and structural adjust­ ment policies in Argentina (Contentious Lives: Two Argentine Women, Two Protests, atid the Quest for Recognition (Durham, NC: Duke Uni­ versity Press, 2003)), George Steinmetz on the formation of the German colonial state (The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality, Ethnography, and Native Policy in the German Overseas Empire (Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 2004)), Georgi Derluguian on nationalist rebellion in Chechnya (Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus (London: Verso, 2004)), and Craig Calhoun on political radicalism (Roots of Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)). 30 31

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See, among influential books, Michel Offerlé, Les Partis politiques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987), and Bernard Pudal, Prendre parti. Pour une sociologie historique du PCF (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1989), on parties; Bernard Lacroix and Jacques Lagroye, eds., Le Président de la République (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Poli­ tiques, 1992), on the presidency; Daniel Gaxie, Le Cens caché. Inégal­ ités culturelles et ségrégation politique (Paris: Seuil, 1978), and Alain Garrigou, Le Vote et la vertu. Comment les Français sont devenus électeurs (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Poli­ tiques, 1992), on voting; Loïc Blondiaux, La Fabrique de l’opinion. Une histoire sociale des sondages (Paris: Seuil, 1998), on polling; Pierre Favre, ed., La Manifestation (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1990), on demonstrations; Michel Dobry, Soci­ ologie des crises politiques (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1992), on political crises; and Erik Neveu, Soci­ ologie des mouvements sociaux (Paris: Montchrestien, 1996), on social movements. Consult also the thematic section on Bourdieu and politi­ cal science edited by Bertrand Voutrat, “Débat: à propos de Pierre Bour­ dieu,” Revue Suisse de science politique 8, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 101-50. 36 See esp. Bourdieu, Interventions. 37 This is particularly visible in the case of publishing and the media: Bourdieu’s sociology of the fields of cultural production, The Field o f Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), was key to his successfully launching a publishing house, Raisons d ’agir Éditions, and to the efficacy of his critique of journalism [On Televi­ sion was on the bestseller lists for months due to the furious reactions of journalists against it, which made them active propagandists of an analysis they deemed sacrilegious). 38 Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” Theory, Culture, and Society 16, no. 1 (February 1999 [1998]): 41-57, and chapter 9 in this volume. See also the double issue of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales on that theme (121/2, March 1998), and Yves Dezalay and Brian G. Garth’s multidisciplinary study of the packaging and global export of US conceptions of “rule of law” and “civil society” by philanthropic foundations and international agencies, Global Prescriptions: The Production, Exportation, and Importation o f a New Legal Orthodoxy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). 39 Pierre Bourdieu, “Les Conditions sociales de la circulation des idées,” Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte 14, no. 1/2 (1990): 1-10; idem, Firing Back: Against the Tyranny o f the Market 2 (London: Verso, 2003 [2001]); idem. Interventions, pp. 443-50, 457-75. 35

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40

41

42

43 44

45 46 47

48 49 50

27

Pierre Bourdieu, “L’Emprise du journalisme,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 101/2 (March 1994): 3-9; repr. in On Television and Journalism (London: Pluto, 1998 [1996], pp. 68-78). In the Englishlanguage version of this essay included in On Television, the title of Bourdieu’s article is mistranslated as “The Power of Journalism,” which renders incomprehensible his admonition, in the opening line of the text, that “the object here is not ‘the power of journalists’ and even less journalism as a ‘fourth estate’.” For a historical dissection of the crystallization of the mental and social category of “intellectuel” around the Dreyfus Affair and of the social roots of its endurance informed by the theory of field, read Christophe Charle, Naissance des “intellectuels” (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1990); on Bourdieu’s reactivation of the Zola model, read Jean-Philippe Mathy, “The Prophetic Exigency: Zola, Bourdieu, and the Memory of Dreyfusism,” Contemporary Trench Civilization 24, no. 2 (Summer-Fall 2000): 321-40. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Corporatism of the Universal: The Role of Intel­ lectuals in the Modern World,” Telos 81 (Fall 1989): 99-110; idem. The Rules o f Art, pp. 339-48. See in particular Poupeau and Discepolo, “Scholarship with Commit­ ment,” chapter 4 in this volume, pp. 78-81. Pierre Bourdieu, Propos sur le champ politiqtie (Lyon: Presses Univer­ sitaires de Lyon, 2000), pp. 99-107; idem, Firing Back, p. 363; and Loïc Wacquant, “Critical Thought as Solvent of Doxa,” Constellations 11, no. 1 (Spring 2004 [2001]): 97-101. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditatioits, p. 215. Bourdieu, “Le mort saisit le vif,” and idem, Pascalia?i Meditations, p. 216. It is this primacy of the unconscious consent to the injunctions of the social world via the embodiment of extant relations of domination that led Bourdieu “little by little to banish the use of the word ‘ideology’” (ibid.). The sociologist gives for illustration the incarnation of national­ ism and the “mortal passions of all racisms (of ethnicity, gender, or class)” which are “no less strong among the dominated than among the domi­ nant” (ibid., pp. 214-17). Yet the paradigm of the somatization of sym­ bolic violence for Bourdieu is gender domination (see “Masculine Domination Revisited: The Goffman Prize Lecture,” Berkeley Journal o f Sociology 41 (1997): 189-203, and idem, Masculine Domination). Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, pp. 216, 276-8. Ibid., pp. 280-4. Compare Bourdieu’s treatment of the “question of justification” and the “symbolic effects of capital” (Practical Reasons, ch. 4, and Pascalian Meditations, pp. 279-88) with Charles Taylor and Amy Gutman’s view of the politics of multiculturalism, Midticulturalism and the Politics o f Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), Seyla

28

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Benhabib’s theory of justice and cultural diversity in late modernity, The Claims o f Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), and Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth’s dialogue on the relation between redistribution and recognition, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003). Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 83. Bourdieu, “The Uses of ‘The People’,” in In Other Words, pp. 178-84. Bourdieu’s critique of Habermas’s conception of communicative action and ethics would seem to apply readily to political theorists of recog­ nition and advocates of multiculturalism; see Pascalian Meditations, pp. 80-8.

2 From the King’s House to the Reason of State: A Model of the Genesis of the Bureaucratic Field Pierre Bourdieu

The aim of this endeavor is to inquire into the genesis of the state in order to try and identify the specific characteristics of the reason of state (raison d ’État), which the self-evidence associated with the agreement between minds shaped by the state - minds of state - and the structures of the state tends to mask.1 The task at hand is less to probe the factors involved in the emergence of the state than to pin­ point the logic of the historical process which governed the crystal­ lization of this historical reality that is the state, first in its dynastic and then in its bureaucratic form; not so much to describe, in a kind of genealogical narrative, the process of autonomization of a bureau­ cratic field, obeying a bureaucratic logic, than to construct a model of this process - more precisely, a model of the transition from the dynastic state to the bureaucratic state, from the state reduced to the household of the king to the state constituted as a field of forces and a field of struggles oriented towards the monopoly of the legitimate manipulation of public goods.

This article originally appeared as “De la maison du roi à la raison d’État: un modèle de la genèse du champ bureaucratique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 118 (June 1997): 55-68. It is published here by kind permission of Jerome Bourdieu and the journal.

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As R. J. Bonney points out, when studying the “modern nation­ state” we are liable to lose sight of the dynastic state that preceded it: “For the greater part of the period up to 1660 (and, some would say, far beyond that date) the majority of European monarchies were not nation-states as we understand them, with the - perhaps fortu­ itous - exception of France.”2 Absent a clear distinction between the dynastic state and the nation-state, it is impossible to grasp the speci­ ficity of the modern state, which is most clearly revealed in the long transition leading up to the bureaucratic state and in the work of invention, rupture, and redefinition performed in its course. (But perhaps we should be more radical still and deny the name of state to the dynastic state, as J. W. Stieber does.3 Stieber emphasizes the limited power of the Germanic emperor as a monarch appointed by an election requiring papal sanction: fifteenth-century German history is marked by factional, princely politics characterized by pat­ rimonial strategies oriented toward ensuring the prosperity of the princely families and their estates. One finds here none of the fea­ tures of the modern state. It is only in the France and England of the seventeenth century that the main distinctive traits of the emerging modern state appear. European politics from 1330 to 1650 remains characterized by the personal, “proprietary” vision of princes over their government, by the weight of the feudal nobility in politics and also by the claim of the Church to define the norms of political life.)

T h e S pecificity o f th e D ynastic S ta te

The initial accumulation of capital is performed according to the logic characteristic of the house (maison), an entirely original economic and social structure, particularly on account of the system o f strate­ gies o f reproduction through which it ensures its perpetuation. The king, acting as “head of the house,” makes use of the properties of the house (in particular, nobility as symbolic capital accumulated by a domestic group through a range of strategies, of which the most important is marriage) to construct a state, as administration and as territory, that gradually escapes from the logic of the “house.” We must pause for some methodological preliminaries: the ambi­ guity o f the dynastic state, which, from its origin, presents some “modern” features (e.g., the action of jurists who enjoy a measure of autonomy vis-à-vis dynastic mechanisms due to their technical com­ petency and reliance on the academic mode of reproduction), invites readings that tend to unravel the ambiguity of historical reality. The

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3I

temptation of ethnologism can rest on archaic features, such as coro­ nation which may be reduced to a primitive rite of consecration so long as one forgets that it is preceded by acclamation; or the curing of scrofula, a warrant of hereditary charisma, transmitted by blood, and divine delegation. Conversely, ethnocentrism (and the anachro­ nism that comes with it) can point to isolated indicators of moder­ nity, such as the existence of abstract principles and laws, produced by the canonists. But, above all, a superficial understanding of eth­ nology prevents one from drawing on the findings of the anthropol­ ogy of “house-based societies” to carry out a rigorous anthropology of the apex of the state. One can posit that the most fundamental features of the dynastic state can, as it were, be deduced from the model of the house. For the king and his family, the state is identified with the “king’s house,” understood as a patrimony encompassing a household, that is, the royal family itself, which the king must manage as a good “head of the house” (capmaysouè, as the Béarnais put it). Comprising the whole lineage and its possessions, the house transcends the individ­ uals who incarnate it, starting with its head himself, who must be able to sacrifice his particular interests or sentiments to the perpetu­ ation of his material and above all symbolic patrimony (the honor of the house or the name of the lineage). According to Andrew W. Lewis, the mode o f succession defines the kingdom.4 Royalty is an honor transmissible in hereditary agnatic line (the right of blood) and by primogeniture, and the state or royalty is reduced to the royal family. In the dynastic model, first established in the royal family and then generalized to the whole nobility, the principal honor and the individual patrimonial lands go to the eldest son, the heir, whose marriage is treated as a political matter of the utmost importance. One guards against the threat of division by assigning apanages to the younger sons, a compensation aimed to ensure harmony among the brothers (in their testaments, the kings urge each of them to accept his share and not rebel), by marrying them to heiresses or placing them in the Church. One can apply to the French or English royalty, right up to a fairly late period, what Marc Bloch said of the medieval seigneury, founded on the “fusion of the economic group and the sovereignty group.”5 Paternal power constitutes the pattern of domination: the dominant grants protection and maintenance. As in traditional Kabylia, politi­ cal relationships are not autonomized with respect to kinship rela­ tions and are always thought with respect to those relations; the same goes for economic relations. Power rests on personal relationships and affective relationships such as fe a lty ,“love,” and “credit,” that

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are socially instituted and actively maintained, especially through “largesses” (gifts and grants). The transcendence of the state with respect to the king who embodies it for a time is the transcendence of the crown, that is, of the “house” and of the dynastic state which, even in its bureaucratic dimension, remains subordinated to it. Philip IV (Philippe le Bel) is still the head of a lineage, surrounded by his close kin; the “family” is divided into various “chambers,” specialized services that follow the king on his travels. The principle of legitimation is genealogy, the guarantor of the bonds of blood. This is how one can understand the mythology of the king’s two bodies, which has so fascinated histori­ ans since Kantorowicz, and which symbolically designates this duality of the transcendent institution and the person who tempo­ rally and temporarily incarnates it (a duality also observed among the peasants of Béarn, where the male members of the house, under­ stood as the totality of the goods and the totality of the members of the family, were often designated by their forename followed by the name of the house, which implied, in the case of sons-in-law from a different lineage, that they lost their own*family name).7 The king is “head of the house,” socially mandated to implement a dynastic policy, within which matrimonial strategies play a decisive role, in the service of the greatness and prosperity of his “house.” A number of matrimonial strategies have for their aim to foster territorial extensions through dynastic unions founded solely in the person of the monarch. One could give as an example the Habsburg dynasty, which considerably enlarged its empire in the sixteenth century by means of an astute marriage policy: Maximilian I acquired Franche-Comté and the Netherlands by his marriage to Mary of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Bold; his son, Philip the Fair, married Johanna the Mad, Queen of Castile, a union from which was born Charles V. Likewise, it is clear that many conflicts, starting of course with the so-called wars of succession, are a manner of pursu­ ing successional strategies by other means. The war of succession of Castile (1474-79) is a well-known case in point: if Isabella had not won, the dynastic union of Castile and Portugal rather than of Castile and Aragon would have become pos­ sible. Charles V’s war against the Duchy of Guelders brought Guelders into Burgundy in 1543; if the Lutheran Duke William had won, a solid anti-Habsburg state would have been formed around Cleves, Jülich, and Berg, extending to the Zuyderzee. But the partition of Cleves and Jülich in 1614 after the war of succession put an end to that vague possibility. In the Baltic, the union of the crowns of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway ended in 1523; but in each of the wars between Denmark

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33

and Sweden that followed, the question arose again, and it was only in 1560 that the dynastic struggle between the House of Oldenburg and the House of Vasa was resolved when Sweden attained its “natural borders.” In eastern Europe, from 1386 to 1572 the Jagellon kings established a dynastic union of Poland and Lithuania which became a constitutional union from 1569. But the dynastic union of Sweden and Poland was the declared aim of Sigismund III and continued to be that of the kings of Poland until 1660. They also nursed ambitions in Muscovy and in 1610 Ladislas, the son of Sigismund III, was elected Tsar after a coup d’etat by the boyars.8

One of the virtues of the model of the house is that it enables us to escape the teleological vision founded upon the retrospective illu­ sion that makes the construction of France a “project” pursued by the successive kings. Thus Cheruel, for example, in his Histoire de I’administration monarchique en France, explicitly refers to the “will” of the Capetians to create the French monarchical state, and it is not without some surprise that one sees some historians con­ demning the institution of apanages as a “dismemberment” of the royal domain. The dynastic logic accounts well for the political strategies of the dynastic states by allowing us to see in them reproduction strategy of a particular kind. But one must still raise the question of the means or, better, of the particular assets available to the royal family that enabled it to triumph in the competition with its rivals. (Norbert Elias, who so far as I know is the only one who explicitly posed the question, offers, with what he calls the “law of monopoly,” a solu­ tion that I shall not discuss in detail here but which seems to me to be essentially verbal and almost tautological: “If, in a major social unit, a large number of the smaller social units which, through their interdependence, constitute the larger one, are of roughly equal social power and are thus able to compete freely - unhampered by pre­ existing monopolies - for the means to social power, i.e., primarily the means of subsistence and production, the probability is high that some will be victorious and others vanquished, and that gradually, as a result, fewer and fewer will control more and more opportuni­ ties, and more and more units will be eliminated from the competi­ tion, becoming directly or indirectly dependent on an ever-decreasing number.”9) Endowed with the “semi-liturgical power” that sets him “apart from all other potentates, his rivals,”10 combining sovereignty (Roman law) and suzerainty, which allows him to play on feudal logic as a monarch, the king occupies a distinct and distinctive position which, as such, ensures an initial accumulation o f symbolic capital.

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He is a feudal chieftain who has this particular property that he is able to call himself king, with a reasonable chance of having his claim recognized. In effect, in accordance with the logic of the “speculative bubble” dear to the economists, he is founded to believe he is king because the others believe (at least to some extent) that he is king, each having to reckon with the fact that the others reckon with the fact that he is the king. A minimal differential thus suffices to create a maximal gap because it differentiates him from all the others. M ore­ over, the king finds himself placed in the position of center and, due to this, has information on all the others - who, short of forming a coalition, communicate only through him - and he can monitor alliances. He is therefore situated above the fray and predisposed to fulfill the function of an arbiter, a court of appeal. (One can cite here as an exemplification of this model the analy­ sis of Muzaffar Alam which shows how, following the decline of the Mughal Empire of Northern India, correlative of the waning of impe­ rial authority and of the reinforcement of the authority of local nota­ bles and provincial autonomy, the local chieftains continued to perpetuate the “reference to at least an appearance of an imperial center,” invested with a legitimating function: “Again, in the condi­ tions of unfettered political and military adventurism which accom­ panied and followed the decline of imperial power, none of the adventurers was strong enough to be able to win the allegiance of the others and to replace the imperial power. All of them struggled sep­ arately to make their fortunes and threatened each other’s position and achievements. Only some of them, however, could establish their dominance over the others. When they sought institutional validation of their spoils, they needed a centre to legitiinize their acquisi­ tions. ”11)

T h e Specific C on tradictio n s of th e D ynastic S ta te

The initial accumulation of capital is effected to the benefit of a person: the nascent bureaucratic state (and the bureaucratic, aca­ demic mode of management and reproduction associated with it) remains the personal property of a “house” that continues to follow a patrimonial mode of management and reproduction. The king dis­ possesses private powers, but for the benefit of a private power; he perpetuates, within his own dynasty, a familial mode of reproduction antinomic with that which he is establishing (or is being established)

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35

within the bureaucracy (by reference to merit and competency). He concentrates the various forms of power, in particular economic and symbolic power, and redistributes them in “personal” forms (“largesses”) liable to inducing “personal” forms of attachment. Whence all kinds of contradictions that play a decisive role in the transformation of the dynastic state, although historians generally fail to count them among the factors of “rationalization” (such as com­ petition between states - international wars require the concentration and rationalization of power, a self-sustaining process since power is needed to make the war which calls for the concentration of power - or competition between central and local powers). One notes first, until a late date, the permanence of old structures of the patrimonial type. There is, for example, the survival, observed by Roland Mousnier, even within the most bureaucratized sector, of the pattern master/faithful servant, protector/“creature.”12 Seeking to show that one cannot rely solely on the history of institutions in order to understand the real functioning of governmental institutions, Richard Bonney writes: “It was the patronage and clientele system that constituted the active force behind the façade of the official system of administration, which is certainly easier to describe. By their very nature, relations of patronage escape the eyes of the his­ torian; but the importance of a minister, a secretary of state, an inten­ dant, or a king’s counselor depended less on his title than on his influence - or that of his patron. His influence was determined to a large extent by his personality, but even more by the patronage he enjoyed.”13 Another revealing feature is the existence of family-based clans (often designated by the misleading name of “parties”), which paradoxically contributed indirectly to imposing bureaucratization: “The great noble clans, whether loyal or dissident, were structural to the monarchy,” and “the ‘favorite,’ either dissident or liable to be so, exerts his absolute power against the royal family.” 14 Paradoxically, the ambiguities of a system of government that mingles the domestic and the political, the king’s house and the reason of state, are no doubt one of the major causes of the strength­ ening of the bureaucracy, owing to the contradictions they engender: the emergence of the state arises in part thanks to the misunder­ standings born from the fact that one can, in all good faith, describe the ambiguous structures of the dynastic state in a language, that of law in particular, that gives them a quite different foundation and thereby paves the way for their supersession. It was by expressing itself in the language of Roman law, and assisted by an ethnocentric interpretation of the juridical texts, that the dynastic principle was

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gradually converted, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, into a new, properly “statist” principle. The dynastic principle, which plays a central role as early as the time of the Capetians (as attested by the crowning of the heir in childhood), reaches its full development with the constitution of the royal family, consisting of the men and women having royal blood in their veins (“princes of the blood” ). The typi­ cally dynastic metaphor of the royal blood is elaborated through the logic of Roman law, which uses the word “blood” to express filiation (jura sanguinis). Thus, when Charles V restructured the necropolis of Saint Denis, all persons of royal blood (even women and children, boys and girls, even if they died young) were buried around Saint Louis. The juridical principle relies on reflection about the typically dynastic notion of the crown as a principle of sovereignty standing above the royal person. From the fourteenth century, it is an abstract word that designates the king’s estate (“crown domains,” “crown revenue”) and “dynastic continuity, the chain of kings in which his person is but a link.”15 The crown implies the inalienability of the feudal lands and rights of the royal domain, and then of the kingdom itself; it evokes the dignitas and majestas of the royal function (progressively distinguished from the person of the king). Thus, with the idea of the crown, the notion of an autonomous entity, inde­ pendent of the king as individual, takes shape little by little through a reinterpretation of the idea of the house transcending its own members. The jurists are no doubt inclined to effect a creative con­ fusion between the dynastic representation of the house, which still drives them, and the juridical representation of the state as corpus mysticum in the manner of the Church (according to Kantorowicz’s schema). Paradoxically, it is the weight of kinship structures and the threats that palace wars pose for the perpetuation of the dynasty and the power of the prince that foster everywhere, from ancient empires to modern states, the development of forms of authority independent of kinship, in their functioning as in their reproduction. The state as concern is the site of an opposition analogous to that which Berle and Means have introduced with respect to the business corporation, between the hereditary owners of power and the managers, recruited for their competency and lacking property titles16- an opposition that one must be careful not to reify, as happened in the case of the firm. The demands of intra-dynastic struggles (especially among brothers) are at the basis of the first outlines of a division o f the labor o f domination. It is the heirs who must rely on the managers to per­ petuate themselves; it is they who, quite often, must resort to the

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new resources secured by bureaucratic centralization to prevail over the threats represented by their dynastic rivals. This is the case, for example, when such a king uses the resources accrued by the Trea­ sury to buy off the heads of rival lineages or, more subtly, when he monitors the competition among his kinsmen by hierarchically dis­ tributing the symbolic profits granted by the organization of the court. One encounters thus, almost universally, a tripartite division of power, with, alongside the king, the king’s brothers (in the broad sense), dynastic rivals whose authority rests on the dynastic principle of the house, and the king’s ministers, typically homines novi, “new men” recruited for their competency. On can say, at the cost of some simplification, that the king needs ministers to limit and control the power of his brothers and that, conversely, he can use his brothers to limit and control the power of his ministers. The great agrarian empires, composed in their vast majority of small agri­ cultural producers living in communities closed unto themselves and domi­ nated by a minority who ensured the enforcement of order and the management of violence (warriors), and the management of official wisdom conserved in writing (scribes), effect a clear break with family bonds by establishing great bureaucracies of pariahs, excluded from political repro­ duction: eunuchs, priests vowed to celibacy, foreigners with no kinship links with the people of the country (in the praetorian guards of the palaces and the financial services of the empires) and deprived of rights or, in the extreme cases, slaves who are the property of the state and whose goods and posi­ tion can revert to the state at any time.17 In ancient Egypt there was a clearcut distinction between the royal family and the senior administration, with power delegated to “new men” rather than to members of the royal family. Likewise, in ancient Assyria (according to Paul Garelli), the wadu was both slave and “functionary”; in the Achemenide Empire, composed of Medes and Persians, the top civil servants were often Greeks. The same was true in the Mongol Empire, where senior administrators were almost all foreigners.18 The most striking examples are provided by the Ottoman Empire. From Racine’s Bajazet we are familiar with the permanent threat that his broth­ ers and his Vizir, a bureaucratic figure mandated, among others, to control them, represented for the prince. A radical solution after the fifteenth century was the law of fratricide, which required the prince’s brothers to be put to death upon his ascent to the throne.19 As in many empires of the ancient East, it was foreigners, in this case renegades, Islamicized Christians, who rose to the position of high dignitaries.20 The Ottoman Empire was endowed with a cosmopolitan administration;21 what was called the “collecting” of talents ensured a supply of “devoted individuals.” The Ottoman term kul means both “slave” and “servant of the state.”

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One can thus set out the fundamental law of this initial division o f the labor o f domination between the heirs, dynastic rivals endowed with reproductive capacity but reduced to political impotence, and the oblates, politically powerful but deprived of reproductive capac­ ity: to limit the power of the hereditary members of the dynasty, the important positions are filled by individuals external to the dynasty, homines novi or oblates who owe everything to the state they serve and who can, at least in theory, lose the power they have received from it at any moment. But, to protect against the threat of the monopolization of power presented by any holder of a power based on a specialized compe­ tency, more or less scarce, these homines novi are recruited in such a manner that they have no chance of reproducing themselves (the limiting case being eunuchs or clerics vowed to celibacy) and thus of perpetuating their power through channels of a dynastic type, or of durably grounding their power in an autonomous legitimacy, independent of that which the state grants them, conditionally and temporarily, through their status as functionaries. (If the papal state evolved so early, from the twelfth' and thirteenth centuries, into a bureaucratic state, it is likely because it escaped from the start the dynastic model of transmission through the family sometimes perpetuated through the uncle-nephew relationship - and because it had no territory, being limited to taxation and justice.) Countless examples, drawn from the most diverse civilizations, of the effects of this fundamental law could be enumerated, viz., meas­ ures to prevent the emergence of countervailing powers of the same nature as dynastic power (fiefdoms), i.e., powers that are independ­ ent (especially as regards reproduction) and hereditary (this is where feudalism and empire bifurcate). Thus, in the Ottoman Empire, high lords were given a timar, the income from lands, but not ownership of those lands. Another very common arrangement is the attribution of powers that are strictly limited to the incumbent’s lifetime (as with priestly celibacy), in particular by recourse to oblates (parvenus, root­ less individuals), nay pariahs. The oblate is the absolute antithesis to the king’s brother: depending on the state (or, in another context, the party) for everything he has and is, he gives everything to the state, to which he has nothing to oppose, having neither personal interest nor personal force. The pariah is the extreme form of the oblate, since he can at any moment be cast back into the nothingness from which he was raised by the generosity of the state (as with the bour­ siers, the “scholarship boys,” who achieved miraculous mobility

FROM THE K I N G ’ S HOUSE TO THE REASON OF STATE

39

thanks to the educational system, especially during France’s Third Republic). As in the agrarian empires, in the France of Philippe Auguste the bureaucracy was recruited from among homines novi of low birth. And, as has already been seen, the kings of France continually relied on “favorites,” distinguished, as the word itself implies, by an arbi­ trary choice, to thwart the power of the magnates. There were endless struggles between those (genealogically) closest to the king and the favorites who supplanted them in the king’s favor: Catherine de Médicis detests d’Epernon and seeks by every means to oust him. Marie de Médicis will behave in the same manner later towards Richelieu [in 1630], Gaston d’Orléans will plot endlessly against the minister, whom he accuses of tyranny because he comes between the king and his family. On this account, the levy doubles because the “favorite,” now become “first minister,” needs to be rich, powerful, and esteemed in order to attract clienteles who would oth­ erwise swell the ranks of his opponents. The fabulous wealth of the d’Épernons, Mazarins, or Richelieus provide them with the means to carry out their policies. Through d’Epernon and Joyeuse, Henri II con­ trols the state apparatus, the army, and a certain number of provincial administrations. Thanks to his two friends, he felt himself to be rather more King of France.22 One cannot understand the role of the pariahs without taking due note of the ambiguity of the specialist and of technical competency (technë), as prin­ ciple of a virtually autonomous and therefore potentially dangerous power (as Bernard Guénée points out, until 1388 functionaries prided themselves more on their loyalty than their competency).23 In many ancient societies they were regarded with profound ambivalence: in agrarian communities the artisan (demiourgos, especially the blacksmith but also the goldsmith, the armorer, etc.) was the object of contrasted representations and treatments, and was both feared and despised, even stigmatized. Possession of a spe­ cialty, whether metallurgy or magic (which were often associated), finance, or, in another order, military capacity (mercenaries, janissaries, elite corps of the army, condottiere, etc.), could confer a dangerous power. The same was true of writing: we know that the scribes (katib) of the Ottoman Empire tried to confiscate power, just as the families of the sheikhs of Islam attempted to monopolize religious power. According to Garelli, in Assyria the scribes, holders of the monopoly over the use of cuneiform script, held considerable power; they were kept away from the court and, when they were consulted, divided into three groups so that they could not conspire together. These worrisome specialties often fell to ethnic groups that were culturally demarcated and stigmatized, and thus excluded from politics and control over the means of coercion and marks of honor. They were aban-

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doned to outcasts who allowed the dominant group and its representatives to see these functions or specialties fullfilled while officially rejecting them. The powers and privileges that these specialties provided were thus con­ tained, by the very logic of their genesis, within marginal groups that could not reap their full profits, especially in the political arena. The holders of dynastic power have an interest in relying on groups which, like the minorities specializing in occupations linked to finance, in particular the Jews (renowned for their professional reliability and their capacity to supply precisely the required goods and services),24 must be or become powerless (militarily or politically) in order to be authorized to manipulate instruments that, placed in the wrong hands, would be very dan­ gerous. One can also understand in this perspective - that of the division of powers and palace wars - the shift from the feudal army to the mercenary army: the salaried professional army is to the troop of “liegemen” or the “party” as the functionary or “favorite” is to the king’s brothers or the members of the king’s house.

The principle of the main contradiction within the dynastic state (between the king’s brothers and the king’s ministers) lies in the con­ flict between two modes o f reproduction. Indeed, as the dynastic state constitutes itself, as the field of power becomes differentiated (first the king, the bishops, the monks, the knights, then the jurists - who introduce Roman law - and, later, Parliament, then the merchants and the bankers, then the scientists25), and as the beginnings of a division of the labor of domination are instituted, so the mixed, ambiguous, nay contradictory character of the mode of reproduction prevailing within the field of power becomes more accentuated: the dynastic state perpetuates a mode of reproduction based on heredity and on the ideology of blood and birth which is antinomic to that which it is simultaneously instituting in the state bureaucracy, tied to the development of education, itself linked to the emergence of a body of civil servants. It fosters the coexistence of two mutually exclusive modes of reproduction, with the bureaucratic mode, bound up with the school system and therefore with competency and merit, tending to undermine the dynastic, genealogical mode by eroding the princi­ ple of its legitimacy, blood and birth. The transition from the dynastic state to the bureaucratic state is thus inseparable from the movement whereby the new nobility, the “state nobility” (or noblesse de robe), ousts the old nobility, the nobil­ ity of blood. One can see in passing that the ruling circles were the first to undergo a process which extended, much later, to the whole of society, namely, the shift from a family-based mode of reproduc­ tion (ignoring the distinction between public and private) to a bureau­ cratic mode of reproduction based on the mediation of the school.

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4I

The Dynastic Oligarchy and the New Mode of Reproduction But the essential point is that, like the medieval seigneury as described by Marc Bloch, the dynastic state is “a territory whose exploitation is organized in a manner such that part of its products goes to a single character,” who is “both chief and master of the soil.”26 Notwith­ standing the impersonal and bureaucratic elements it may entail, the dynastic state remains oriented towards the person of the king: it con­ centrates different species of capital, various forms of power and material and symbolic resources (money, distinctions, titles, indul­ gences, and exemptions) in the hands of the king so that the latter can, by means of selective redistribution, establish or maintain rela­ tions of dependency (a clientele) or, better, of personal gratitude, and perpetuate his power. Thus, for example, the money accumulated through state taxation is continuously redistributed to very specific categories of subjects (particularly in the form of the pay of soldiers and the salaries of civil servants, administrators, and justice officials), so that the genesis of the state is inseparable from the genesis of a group of agents whose interests are bound up with it, who have a vested interest in its func­ tioning. (One would need to examine here the analogy with the Church: the power of the Church is not properly measured, as has often been supposed, by the number of “Easter communicants” but rather by the number of those who directly or indirectly owe the eco­ nomic and social foundations of their social existence, in particular their income, to the Church, and who are for this reason “interested” in its existence.27) The state is a profitable enterprise, first for the king himself and for those to whom he extends the benefit of his largesses. The strug­ gle to make the state thus becomes increasingly indissociable from a struggle to appropriate the profits associated with the state (a strug­ gle that will extend ever more widely with the advent of the welfare state). As Denis Crouzet has shown,28 the battles for influence around the throne had as stake the capture of central positions liable to procure the financial advantages that the nobles needed to maintain their standard of living (whence, for example, the support of Duc de Nevers for Henri II or the young Guise’s siding with Henri IV in exchange for 1.2 million pounds destined to pay off his father’s debts). In short, the dynastic state institutes the private appropriation o f public resources by a few. Just as the personal bond of the feudal type is made contractual and remunerated no longer with land but

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with money or power, so the “parties” fight among themselves, espe­ cially within the king’s council, for control over the circuit of taxation. The ambiguity of the dynastic state is perpetuated (it will continue under other guises after the disappearance of that state) because there exist particular, private interests and profits in appropriating w hat is public and universal, and because ever-renewed opportunities arise for such appropriation: namely, over and beyond the structural fact of corruption, the venality of public offices - from the fourteenth century on - and the hereditary character of public offices - the Paulet edict of 1604 made them private property - instituted “a new feu­ dalism.”29 Royal power must then set up commissioners to regain control of the administration.30 From the point of view of the king (and of central power in general), the ideal would be to concentrate and redistribute the total­ ity of resources, thereby completely controlling the process of pro­ duction of symbolic capital. In reality, however, owing to the division of the labor of domination, there are always leakages: the servants of the state always tend to serve therriselves directly (instead of waiting for redistribution) by creaming off and diverting material and symbolic resources. Thence a veritable structural corruption which, as Pierre-Étienne Will has shown, is above all the deed of intermedi­ ate authorities: aside from “regular irregularities” - that is, extor­ tions aimed at covering personal and professional costs, of which it is hard to determine whether they pertain to “institutionalized cor­ ruption” or to the “informal financing of expenses” - there are all the advantages that lower-level functionaries can derive from their strategic position in the upward and downward circulation of infor­ mation, either by selling vital data to the higher authorities or by refusing to pass on a request, or by doing so only in exchange for payment, or yet by refusing to transmit an order.31 More generally, the holders of a delegated authority can derive all kinds of profit from their position as intermediaries. In accordance with the logic of the law and its exemptions (passe-droit),32 any administrative act or process can be blocked or delayed, or facilitated and speeded up (in exchange for a sum of money). The subordinate often possesses an advantage over his superiors (and over supervising agencies in par­ ticular): he is close to the “ground” and, when he is well established in his post, he is often part of the local society. (Jean-Jacques Laffont has proposed formal models of “supervision” conceived in terms of the theory of contracts as a game between three players: the entre­ preneur, the supervisor, and the operatives.33 Although the model gives a fairly good account of the strategic position of the supervisor,

FROM THE K I N G ’ S HOUSE TO THE REASON OF STATE

43

who can threaten the workers with revealing information - e.g., iden­ tify who is responsible for poor results - and hide the truth from the employer, it seems rather unrealistic: it ignores in particular both the effects of dispositions and the constraints of the bureaucratic field, which can impose censorship on egoistic inclinations.) This having been said, one can describe corruption as a leakage in the process of accumulation and concentration of statist capital: direct embezzlement and redistribution which allow for the accumu­ lation of economic and symbolic capital at the lower levels (that of the proconsuls or feudal lords who are “kings” on a smaller scale) forbid or slow down the transition from feudalism to empire or foster a regression from empire back to feudalism.

The Logic of the Process of Bureaucratization Thus the first assertion of the distinction between the public and the private comes within the sphere of power. It leads to the constitution of a properly political order of public authorities, endowed with its own logic (the reason of state), its autonomous values, its specific lan­ guage, and distinct from the domestic (royal) and the private. This distinction will eventually spread to the whole of social life; but it must, as it were, start with the king, in the mind of the king and of his entourage, whom everything inclines, in a kind of institutional narcissism, to confound the resources or interests of the institution with the resources and interests of the person of the king. The formula “L’État, c’est moi” expresses above all the conflation of the public order and the private order that defines the dynastic state and against which the bureaucratic state will have to be constructed, based as it is on the dissociation of the position and its occupant, the function and the functionary, the public interest and private interests - disinterestedness being an essential attribute of the civil servant. The court is a space at once public and private. It can even be described as a confiscation of social capital and symbolic capital for the benefit of one person, a monopolization of public space. Patrimonialism is this kind of permanent coup d ’état whereby a private individual appropriates public goods, a diversion of the properties and profits attached to the function for the benefit of the person (it can take very diverse forms and, while particularly visible in the dynastic phase, it remains a permanent possibility in later phases, with the President of the Republic usurping the attributes of the

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monarch or, in a quite different order of things, the professor playing the “minor prophet stipended by the state” of which Weber writes). Personal power, which need be not at all absolute, is a private appro­ priation of public might and the private exercise of that might (viz. the Italian principalities). The gradual rupture with the dynastic state takes the form of the dissociation between imperium (public might) and dominium (private power), between the public space, the forum, the agora, as the place of aggregation of the congregated people, and the palace (for the Greeks the foremost feature of barbarian cities was their lack of an agora). The concentration of political means is accompanied by the political expropriation of private powers: “Everywhere the develop­ ment of the modern state is initiated through the action of the prince. He paves the way for the expropriation of the autonomous and ‘private’ bearers of executive power who stand beside him, of those who in their own right possess the means of administration, warfare, and financial organization, as well as politically usable goods of all sorts.”34 But, more generally, the process of “defeudalization” implies a severing of “natural” bonds (of kinship) and “natural” processes of reproduction, that is, those not mediated by a non-domestic agency - royal power, bureaucracy, educational institution, etc. The state is essentially an antiphysis: it institutes (the noble, the heir, the judge, etc.), it appoints, it is bound up with institution, constitution, nomos, that which exists “by law,” nomb {ex instituto), as opposed to phusei, “by nature.” It institutes itself in and through the establishment of a specific loyalty that implies a rupture with all original loyalties towards ethnic group, caste, family, etc. In all this the state stands in opposition to the specific logic of kinship, which, arbitrary as it is, remains the most “natural” or naturalizable (via blood connections) of social institutions. This process of defeudalization of the state goes hand in hand with the development of a specific mode of reproduction in which scholas­ tic education plays an important part. (In ancient China, the func­ tionary had to have a specific education and be totally detached from private interests.) The universities, which appeared as early as the twelfth century, burgeoned throughout Europe from the fourteenth century under the impulse of the princes: they fulfilled an essential role in training the servants of the state, lay or clerical. But, more generally, the genesis of the state is inseparable from a veritable cultural mutation: from the twelfth century in Western Europe, the mendicant orders that developed in the urban setting brought to a lay audience a literature hitherto reserved solely for highly cultured churchmen. Thus began an educational process that accelerated with

FROM THE KING 'S HOUSE TO THE REASON OF STATE

45

the foundation of urban schools in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen­ turies and the invention of printing. Correlative of the development of education, the substitution of nomination by public authorities for the inheritance of offices had for consequence the “clericalization” of the nobility (particularly visible in Japan). As Marc Bloch observed, England was a unified state long before any other European kingdom because there “public office” was not completely identified with fiefdom. Very early on, non-hereditary royal officials, the sheriffs, were directly appointed. The crown resisted feudal fragmentation by governing through agents drawn from the local society but appointed by it and similarly liable to being removed from office (Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer situate the generalized shift from the “household” to bureaucratized forms of government around 1530). At the same time the nobility became demilitarized: “Most of the landowning class was, during the Tudor epoch, turning away from its traditional training in arms to an education at the universities or the Inns of Court.”35 Similarly, the militia became a state prerogative, with the shift “from private magnate, commanding his own servants, to lord lieutenant, acting under royal commission.”36 In the same way that the feudal nobility converted themselves into officers appointed by the king, so the French curia régis turned into a genuine administration. In the eleventh and thirteenth centuries the Parlement de Paris and the Chambre des comptes respectively emerged from it, followed by the Grand Conseil in the fifteenth; the process was completed in the middle of the seventeenth century, with the establishment of the Conseils du gouvernement (held in the pres­ ence of the king and chancellor) and the Conseils d'administration et de justice?7 (But the process of nominal differentiation - Conseil étroit, Conseil des affaires, Conseil secret, called, after 1643, Conseil d'en haut. Conseil des dépêches, created around 1650, Conseil des finances, Conseil du commerce, 1730 - conceals a deep interlocking of their business.) Feudal government is personal: it is ensured by a group of men surrounding the sovereign, barons, bishops, and commoners on whom the king can count. From the middle of the twelfth century the English monarchs started to recruit churchmen, but the develop­ ment of common law in England and Roman law on the continent led them to rely more and more on laymen. A new group thus appeared, that owed its position to its professional competency, and therefore to the state and its culture: the civil servants. It is in this light that one can understand the decisive role of the “clerks,” whose rise accompanies the emergence of the state and of

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whom one can say that they create the state which creates them, or that they make themselves by making the state. From the beginning, their interests are bound up with it: they have their own mode of reproduction and, as Georges Duby indicates, from the twelfth century “the top and middle-rank bureaucracy comes almost entirely from the colleges.”38 They would gradually construct their specific institutions, the most typical of which is the Parlement, guardian of the law (especially civil law, which, from the second half of the twelfth century, becomes autonomized from canon law). Endowed with specific resources suited to the needs of administration, such as writing and law, they secured a monopoly over the most typically statist resources very early on. Their intervention indisputably con­ tributed to the rationalization of power: first, as Duby notes, they introduced rigor into the exercise of power, by giving standard form to judgments and keeping records.39 Next, they implemented the mode of thinking typical of canon law and the scholastic logic upon which it is founded (with, for example, the distinguo, the quaestio, and the play of arguments for and against, or the inquisitio, the rational inquiry substituting proof for tëst and leading to a written report). Finally, they constructed the idea of the state on the model of the Church in treatises on power that refer to Floly Scripture, the Book of Kings, and Saint Augustine, but also to Aristotle, in which kingship is conceived as a magistrature (he who holds it by inheri­ tance is God’s elect but, to show himself to be a good guardian of the res publica, he must take account of its nature and make good use of reason). Following Georges Duby again,40 one can show how the clerks contributed to the genesis of a rational bureaucratic habitus: they invented the virtue of prudence, which inclines one to control affective pulsions, to act lucidly in light of one’s intelligence, with a sense of proportion; and courtesy, an instrument of social reg­ ulation. (In contrast to N orbert Elias, who portrays the state as the fount of the “civilizing process,” Duby suggests, very rightly, that the clerical invention of courtesy contributed to the invention of the state, which in turn contributed to the development of courtesy; the same is true of sapientia, a general disposition bearing on all aspects of life.) A fictio juris, the state is a fiction of jurists who contribute to pro­ ducing the state by producing a theory of the state, a performative discourse on things public. The political philosophy they produce is not descriptive but productive and predictive of its object; and those who treat the works of the jurists, from Guicciardini (one of the first users of the notion of raison d ’État) or Giovani Botero to Loiseau or Bodin, as simple theories of the state forbid themselves from under-

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standing the distinctively creative contribution that legal thinking made to the birth of state institutions.41 The jurist, master of a joint social store of words, of concepts, offers the means to think realities yet unthinkable (with, for example, the notion of corporatio) and proposes a whole arsenal of organizational techniques and opera­ tional models (often borrowed from the ecclesiastical tradition and destined to undergo a process of secularization), a stock of solutions and precedents. (As Sarah Hanley shows very clearly, there was a con­ stant to-and-fro between juridical theory and royal or parliamentary practice.42) So much to say that one cannot simply draw from the reality analyzed by the concepts (e.g., sovereignty, coup d’état) one intends to use to understand that reality, of which they partake and which they helped make. It also means that to adequately understand political writings which, far from being simple theoretical descrip­ tions, are veritable practical prescriptions, intended to bring into being a new type of social practice by giving it a meaning and a purpose, one must reinsert the works and their authors into the enter­ prise of construction of the state with which they stand in a dialec­ tical relationship. One must in particular resituate the authors in the nascent juridical field, and in the broader social space, since their positions - in relation to other jurists and also to the central power - can be at the basis of their theoretical construction. (A close reading of William Farr Church’s book on constitutional thought in early modern France suggests that the “légistes” were distinguished by theoretical stances that varied according to their distance from the court:43 “absolutist” discourse tended to come from those jurists closest to the central power who established a clear division between the king and his subjects and removed all reference to intermediate powers such as the États généraux, whereas the Parlements had more ambiguous positions.) Everything leads one to hypothesize that the writings through which the jurists sought to impose their vision of the state, and in particular their idea of “public benefit” (of which they are the inventors), were also strategies whereby they sought to win recognition of their prece­ dence and of their own importance by asserting the priority of the “public service” with which they were bound up. (One thinks here of the attitude of the tiers état during the General Estates of 1614-15 and the policy of the Parliament of Paris, especially during the Fronde, aiming to change the hierarchy of the orders, to secure recognition of the order of magistrates, of “gentlemen of pen and ink” as the first among the orders, to place in the first rank not the armed service but the civil service of the state; and also of the struggles, within the crys­ tallizing field of power, between the king and the Parlement, construed

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by some as a body legitimating royal power, by others as intended to limit it, to which the “lit de justice” gave rise.44) In short, those who made perhaps the clearest contribution to the advance of reason and the universal had a clear interest in the universal; one can even say that they had a private interest in the public interest.45 But it does not suffice to describe the logic of this process of imper­ ceptible transformation leading to the emergence of this historically unprecedented social reality that is modern bureaucracy, i.e., the insti­ tution of a relatively autonomous administrative field, independent of politics (denegation) and of the economy (disinterestedness) and obeying the specific logic of the “public.” Beyond the intuitive half­ understanding that springs from our familiarity with the finished state, one must try to reconstruct a deep sense of the series of infin­ itesimal and yet all equally decisive inventions - the bureau, signa­ ture, stamp, decree of appointment, certificate, register, circular, etc. - that led to the establishment of a properly bureaucratic logic, an impersonal and interchangeable power that, in this sense, has all the appearances of “rationality” even as it is invested with the most mys­ terious properties of magical efficacy.

T h e C irc u it o f D e le g a tio n and th e G enesis o f th e A d m in is tra tiv e Field

The progressive dissociation of dynastic authority (the king’s broth­ ers) and bureaucratic authority was concretely effected through the differentiation of power and, more precisely, through the lengthen­ ing of the chains of authority and agency. One could say, for the sake of a pleasing formula, that the (impersonal) state is the small change of absolutism, as if the king had been dissolved into the impersonal network of a long chain of mandated plenipotentiaries who are answerable to a superior from whom they receive their authority and their power, but also, to some extent, answerable for him and for the orders they receive from him and which they monitor and ratify by executing them. To understand what is so extraordinary about this shift from per­ sonal to bureaucratic power, one must return once more to a moment typical of the long transition from the dynastic principle to the juridi­ cal principle wherein the separation is gradually effected between the “household” and the bureaucracy, i.e., between the hereditary but politically unimportant “great offices” and w hat the English tradi­ tion calls the “cabinet,” non-hereditary but invested with power over

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49

the seals. This is an extremely complex movement with advances and retreats, which different agents effect at varying rates, depending on the interests attached to their positions, and which encounters count­ less obstacles, linked in particular to habits of thought and uncon­ scious dispositions. Thus, as Jacques Le Goff notes, the bureaucracy is first understood on the model of the family; or again, the king’s ministers, still attached to the dynastic vision, sometimes want to ensure the hereditary transmission of offices. In his Constitutional History o f England, F. W. Maitland evokes the evolution of practices regarding the royal seals.46 From the Norman period, the royal will was signified by acts, charters, and letters patent, closed and sealed with the royal seal, which warranted their authenticity. The “great seal” was entrusted to the Chancellor, head of the entire secretariat. In the late Middle Ages and through­ out the whole Tudor period, the Chancellor was the sovereign’s first minister. Little by little other seals appeared. Because the Chancellor used the “great seal” for many purposes, a “privy seal” was used for matters directly concerning the king. The king gave directives to the Chancellor about the use of the great seal under his privy seal. The latter was later entrusted to an “officer,” the Keeper of the Privy Seal. In due course, an even more private secretary, the “king’s clerk” or “king’s secretary,” intervened between the monarch and these great officers of state as keeper of the “king’s signet.” Under the Tudors, there were two secretaries to the king, who were designated as “sec­ retaries of state.” A routine came to be established whereby docu­ ments signed by the king’s hand, the “royal sign manual,” and countersigned by the secretary of state (Keeper of the King’s Signet), were sent to the Keeper of the Privy Seal as directives for the docu­ ments to be issued under the privy seal; these in turn served as instruc­ tions to the Chancellor to issue documents bearing the “great seal” of the kingdom. This act implied a degree of ministerial responsibil­ ity for the acts of the king: no act was legally valid unless it bore the great seal or at least the privy seal, which verified that a minister “had committed himself in this expression of the royal will.” Ministers were therefore very attentive to maintaining this formalism: they feared being challenged over acts of the king and being unable to prove that they were indeed royal acts. The Chancellor was fearful of applying the great seal in the absence of a document bearing the privy seal as a guarantee; the Keeper of the Privy Seal was anxious to have the king’s hand-written signature validated by the king’s sec­ retary. As for the king, he found many advantages in this procedure: it made it incumbent upon the ministers to look after the king’s inter­ ests, to know the state of his affairs, and to make sure that he was

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not being deceived or misled. He acted under the warranty but also under the oversight of his ministers, whose responsibility was engaged in the acts of the sovereign which they guaranteed (during the reign of Elizabeth, an oral order could not suffice to commit expenditure, and the royal guarantee had to be sealed with the great seal or the privy seal, which, far from being mere ceremonial symbols, were real instruments of rule). One sees here how, through the lengthening of the chain of author­ ities and responsibilities, there came into being a veritable public order founded upon a degree of reciprocity within hierarchical rela­ tions themselves: the executant is both controlled and protected by the decision-makers; and, from his vantage point, the executant con­ trols and protects his superior, in particular against the abuse of power and the arbitrary exercise of authority. Everything takes place as if the more a ruler’s power increases, the greater his dependency on a whole network of executive relays. In one sense, the freedom and responsibility of each agent is reduced, to the point of being com­ pletely dissolved in the field. In another sense, it increases inasmuch as each agent is forced to act in a responsible manner, under the cover and control of all the other agents engaged in the field. Indeed, as the field of power becomes more differentiated, each link in the chain itself becomes a point (an apex) in a field. (The growing differentia­ tion of the field of power takes shape at the same time as the con­ stitution of the bureaucratic field - the state - as a meta-field that determines the rules governing the various fields and that is for this reason the stake of struggles among the dominant in the different fields.) The lengthening of the chain of delegation and the development of a complex structure of power do not automatically entail the with­ ering away of the mechanisms aimed at securing private appropria­ tion of economic and symbolic capital (and of all the forms of structural corruption). One could say, on the contrary, that the poten­ tial for misappropriation via direct extraction increases, since central patrimonialism can coexist with local patrimonialism (based on the familial interests of the civil servants or corporate solidarity). The dis­ sociation of the function from the person occurs only gradually, as if the bureaucratic field were still torn between the dynastic (or per­ sonal) principle and the juridical (or impersonal) principle. What we call the “civil service” was so bound up with its occupants that it is impossible to retrace the history of a given council or post without writing the history of the individuals who chaired it or held it. It is the fact of being held by a personality that gave exceptional

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5I

importance to an office hitherto considered secondary, or that pushed to a lower tier a post deemed central by virtue of its previous incum­ bent. . . . The man made the function to an extent that is unthinkable now. 47

Nothing is more uncertain and more improbable than the inven­ tion, in theory (with the self-interested work of the jurists, always both judge and jury) and in practice (with the imperceptible advance of the division of the labor of domination), of matters public, the public good, and especially of the structural conditions (tied to the emergence of a bureaucratic field) of the dissociation of private inter­ est and public interest, or, to put it more clearly, the sacrifice of ego­ istic interests, the renunciation of the private use of a public power. But the paradox is that the difficult genesis of a public realm comes hand in hand with the appearance and accumulation of a public capital, and with the emergence of the bureaucratic field as a field of struggles for control over this capital and of the corresponding power, in particular power over the redistribution of public resources and their associated profits. The state nobility, which, as Denis Richet has shown, asserted itself in France between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, and whose reign was not to be interrupted - quite the contrary - by the Revolution of 1789, bases its domination on what Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie called “fiscal capitalism” and on the monopolization of high state positions with high profits.48 The bureaucratic field, gradually conquered against the patrimonial logic of the dynastic state, which subordi­ nated the material and symbolic profits of the capital concentrated by the state to the interests of the sovereign, becomes the site of a struggle for power over statist capital and over the material profits (salaries, benefits) and symbolic profits (honors, titles, etc.) it pro­ vides, a struggle reserved in fact for a minority of claimants desig­ nated by the quasi-hereditary possession of educational capital. One would need to analyze in detail the two-sided process from which the state has issued and which is inseparably universalization and monopolization of the universal. (Translated by Richard Nice and Loïc Wacquant)

Notes 1 This text is the lightly revised transcript of a set of lectures given at the Collège de France. As a provisional summary intended mainly to serve

52

2

3

4

5 6 7

8 9 10

11

12

13 14

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as a research tool, it extends the analysis of the process of concentra­ tion of the various forms of capital ushering in the constitution of a bureaucratic field capable of controlling the other fields (cf. Pierre Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State: On the Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” Sociological Theory 12, no. 1 (March 1994) [1993]: 1-19; abridged version repr. in Practical Reasons: On the Theory o f Action (Cambridge: Polity, 1998 [1994]). Richard J. Bonney, The European Dynastic States 1549-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), and idem, “Guerre, fiscalité et activité d’État en France (1500-1660). Quelques remarques préliminaires sur les possibilités de recherche,” in Genèse de l’Etat moderne. Prélèvement et redistribution, ed. Jean-Philippe Genêt and Michel Le Mené (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1987), pp. 193-220, esp. p. 194. Joachim W. Stieber, Pope Eugenius IV, the Council o f Basel and the Secular and Ecclesiastical Authorities in the Empire, Studies in the History of Christian Thought, 13 (Leiden: Brill, 1978), esp. pp. 126-31. Andrew W. Lewis, Royal Succession in Capetian France: Studies on Familial Order and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Marc Bloch, Seigneurie française et manoir anglais (Paris: Armand Colin, 1960). Georges Duby, Le Moyen Âge (Paris: Hachette, 1989), p. 110. [Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Polit­ ical Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Pierre Bourdieu, Le Bal des célibataires. La crise de la société paysanne en Béarn (Paris: Seuil/Points, 2002)—Trans.] Bonney, “Guerre, fiscalité et activité d’État,” p. 195. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, rev. edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000 [1939]), p. 169. Georges Duby, Preface to the French edition of Andrew W. Lewis, Le Sang royal. La famille capétienne et l’État, France, X e-X IV e siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), p. 9. Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis o f Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707-1748 (Oxford and Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 17; my emphasis. Roland Mousnier, Les Institutions de la France sous la monarchie absolue, vol. 1 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974), pp. 89-93. Bonney, “Guerre, fiscalité et activité d’État,” p. 199. J.-M. Constant, “Clans, partis nobiliaires et politiques au temps des guerres de religion,” in Genèse de l’État moderne, ed. Genêt and Le Mené, pp. 224, 223. Bernard Guénée, L’Occident aux X IV e et X V e siècles. Les États (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), p. 26.

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53

16 Adolph A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York: Macmillan, 1932). 17 Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1978); see esp. ch. 4 on the employment of real eunuchs. 18 Paul Garelli, Jean-Marie Durant, and Hatice Gönnet, Le Proche-Orient asiatique, vol. 1: Ses origines aux invasions des peuples de la mer, 3rd edn (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997). 19 Robert Mantran, ed., Histoire de l’empire ottoman (Paris: Fayard, 1989), pp. 27, 165-6. 20 Ibid., pp. 119 and 171-5. 21 Ibid., pp. 161 and 163-73. 22 Constant, “Clans, partis nobiliaires et politiques au temps des guerres de religion,” p. 223. 23 Guénée, L’Occident aux XIVe et XV e siècles, p. 230. 24 Ernst Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). 25 Duby, Le Moyen Âge, p. 326. 26 Bloch, Seigneurie française et manoir anglais, p. 17. 27 [See Pierre Bourdieu and Monique de Saint Martin, “La sainte famille. L’épiscopat français dans le champ du pouvoir,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 44/5 (March 1982): 2-53—Trans.] 28 Denis Crouzet, “La crise de l’aristocratie en France au XVIe siècle,” His­ toire, Économie, Société 1 (1982): 326-52. 29 Victor-Lucien Tapié, France in the Age o f Louis XIII and Richelieu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 55. 30 François Olivier-Martin, Histoire du droit français, des origines à la Révolution (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1996), p. 344. 31 Pierre-Etienne Will, “Bureaucratie officielle et bureaucratie réelle. Sur quelques dilemmes de l’administration impériale à l’époque des Qing,” Études chinoises 8, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 69-141. 32 Pierre Bourdieu, “Droit et passe-droit. Le champ des pouvoirs territo­ riaux et la mise en œuvre des règlements,” Actes de la recherche en sci­ ences sociales 81-2 (March 1990): 86-96. 33 Jean-Jacques Laffont, “Hidden Gaming in Hierarchies: Facts and Models,” The Economic Record (1989): 295-306. 34 Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans., ed. and with an introduction by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 82. 35 Penry Williams, The Tudor Régime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 241. 36 Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State For­ tnation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 64. 37 Philippe Goubert, L’Ancien Régime (Paris: Armand Colin, 1973), vol. 2, p. 47. 38 Duby, Le Moyen Âge, p. 326.

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39 40 41 42 43

44 45

46 47 48

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Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., p. 222. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations o f M odem Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Sarah Hanley, The “Lit de Justice” o f the Kings o f France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). William Farr Church, Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth-Century France: A Study in the Evolution o f Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941). Hanley, “Lit de Justice.” On the history of the longue durée of the rise of the “clerks” and the gradual monopolization of statist capital by the “state nobility,” beyond and because of the French Revolution, see Pierre Bourdieu, The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field o f Power (Cambridge: Polity, 1996 [1989]), pp. 369-93. F. W. Maitland, Constitutional History o f England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), pp. 202-3. Denis Richet, La France moderne. L’esprit des institutions (Paris: Flammarion, 1973), pp. 79-80. Denis Richet, “Élite et noblesse. La formation des grands serviteurs de l’État - fin XVIe-début XVIIe siècle,” Acta Poloniae Historica 36 (1977): 47-63.

3 The Mystery of Ministry: From Particular Wills to the General W ill Pierre Bourdieu

A multitude of men are made one person when they are by one man, or one person, represented; so that it be done with the consent of every one of that multitude in particular. For it is the unity of the represen­ ter, not the unity of the represented, that maketh the person one. Thomas FFobbes, Leviathan

One will never assert and reassert often enough how much the illu­ sion of naturalness and the illusion that “things have always been thus,” as we put it in The Craft o f Sociology, ‘ as well as the amnesia of genesis in which they are rooted, are an obstacle to scientific knowledge of the social world. What could be more natural, more self-evident, for example, than the act of voting, which the diction­ ary defines, very (socio)logically, in tautological manner, as “the act of expressing one’s opinion by means of one’s vote, one’s suffrage”? And we shall no doubt never catch a “political philosopher” posing, with the very natural solemnity with which Heidegger asked “What is called thinking?,” the question “What is called voting?” And yet This essay appeared first as “Le mystère du ministère: des volontés partic­ ulières à la ‘volonté générale’,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 140 (December 2001): 7-11. It is published here by kind permission from Jérome Bourdieu and the journal.

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all the resources of “essential thought” would not be superfluous, in this case, to lift the veil of ignorance that forbids us from discover­ ing the historical contingency of w hat is instituted, ex institute), and, by the same token, from posing the question of the lateral possibles that have been eliminated by history and the social conditions of pos­ sibility of the possible preserved. To introduce the question of the relationship between the product, that is, the vote, the “act by w hich” - as Le Robert dictionary puts it - “one expresses one’s will, one’s opinion, in a choice, a delibera­ tion or a designation, especially in the juridical or political sphere,” and the social conditions in which it is not only expressed but also produced, it suffices to quote a particularly enlightening page from Durkheim’s Leçons de sociologie: For votes to be an expression of something other than individuals, for them to be animated by a collective mind, the elementary voting college must not be formed of individuals brought together only for this excep­ tional occasion, individuals who do not know each other, who have not contributed to forming one another’s opinions and who merely pass one after another before the ballot box. They must, on the con­ trary, be a constituted, coherent, permanent group that does not just take shape for a moment, the day of the vote. Then every individual opinion, because it has been formed within a collectivity, has some­ thing collective about it. It is clear that the corporation or guild answers this desideratum. Because the members who compose it are in close and constant contact, their sentiments are formed in common and express the community.2

Durkheim posits that one cannot separate the vote from its social conditions of production and, more precisely, that the form and content of a political action are inseparable from the mode of exis­ tence of the group within which it is produced. And he thus coun­ terposes, on the one hand, the occasional coming together of individuals who pass in a booth in an isolated state, one by one, singuli, w ithout having cooperated beforehand to produce their opin­ ions and, on the other hand, a perm anent and integrated group, a social body (corps), capable of working collectively to produce a genuinely collective opinion. Whatever one thinks of the “corporatist” philosophy that he opposes to the liberal philosophy of the vote as a free and individual choice, Durkheim has the merit of showing that one must distinguish the mode o f production or elaboration o f opinion (which he proposes to transform) from the mode o f expression of that opinion (which, in the example adduced, is preserved). And, above all, he has the

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merit of inviting us to make explicit the philosophy of electoral practice ordinarily taken for granted. The liberal vision identifies the elementary act of democracy as it is ordinarily conceived with the solitary, nay silent and secret, action of individuals “brought together only for this exceptional occasion, individuals who do not know each other, who have not contributed to forming one another’s opinions.” This act, at once public and secret, is artificially instituted by the polling booth whose protective curtain, hiding the choice made from the sight and therefore the oversight of others, creates, together with the ballot box into which the ballot chosen is cast, the material con­ ditions for the invisible, uncontrollable, and unuerifiable expression (this is what distinguishes it from the vote by “show of hands”) of an opinion said to be personal, which, for various reasons, one may wish to keep secret. In addition, by bringing into existence, on a spe­ cific day, the succession of individuals who “pass one after another before the ballot box” and by suspending, “for a moment,” just long enough to make a choice, all social bonds, between husband and wife, father and son, employer and employee, priest and parishioner, teacher and pupil, and, by the same token, dependencies and com­ mitments (how to verify, even within a group based on mutual acquaintance or a corporate body, whether such and such an indi­ vidual has kept his or her promise?), it reduces groups to a detotalized series of individuals whose “opinion” will never be more than a statistical aggregation of individual opinions individually expressed. One thinks of the utopia dear to Milton Friedman, who, to grasp the point of view of families about schools, proposes to hand out vouch­ ers enabling them to purchase educational services provided by com­ peting enterprises: “Parents could express their views about schools directly by withdrawing their children from one school and sending them to another, to a much greater extent than is now possible.”3 This amounts to treating political action as the purchase of a good or service, whether a religious or political position-taking, a televi­ sion channel or a store, in short as a form of economic action. And one cannot but evoke here also the model put forth by Albert Hirschman by generalizing the experience of the consumer who, confronted with a “lemon” (a deficient product), chooses between “exit,” leaving the game, going to another store, and “voice,” staying to protest by expressing criticisms and claims, an alternative which appears clear-cut only so long as one remains within the logic of individual action.4 Within this logic, which is that of voting but also that of the market, “collective” opinion is the product not of a genuine collective action, a work of collective elaboration of opinion such as Durkheim evokes,

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but, rather, of pure statistical aggregation o f individual opinions indi­ vidually produced and expressed. The cumulation of individual strate­ gies and acts is collective, as it were, objectively. Statistical aggregation operates only in a mechanical manner, and the interrelating of opin­ ions takes place outside the agents and independently o f their con­ sciousness and will. Individual opinions, reduced to the state of votes materialized by voting slips and mechanically countable, like pebbles, tesserae, or tokens, are added together passively, without anything being done to each of them. The statistical mode of thinking is perfectly suitable in this case, as it is whenever one seeks to understand actions whose necessity is imposed “in and through the anarchy of individual actions” (as Friedrich Engels says about the market), actions such as those which Max Weber calls uniform, or arising from similarity, the limiting case being the behavior of people who open their umbrellas in a cloudburst.5 The logic of aggregation, which is at the heart of statistical - and also economic - thought, presupposes conditions of validity, which in turn imply limits. It imposes itself whenever groups are reduced to the state of aggregates, sets of juxtaposed, accumulated, agglomer­ ated elements which, like the individuals present at a given moment in the waiting hall of a railway station, coexist partes extra partes, like grains in a heap of sand, without communicating or cooperating as do the members of a group mobilized towards an action, political or otherwise. (Statistical analysis of individual opinions, through surveys or opinion polls, apprehends the sets subjected to analysis as aggregates and contributes to constituting them as such; the tech­ nique of random sampling, which rests on the same presupposition, has the effect - unless special precautions are taken in the treatment of the data thus constructed - of eliminating the functional weight of the units that the random selection treats as interchangeable, thereby obliterating structures, those of fields for example.) Statistical or aggregative logic is fully valid only when a set of individuals is reduced to the state of an aggregate because it does not contain within itself the principle of its own assembly, its unity, its aggregation, and because, having no power over itself, it is reduced to powerlessness or to purely individual strategies of subversion or dissidence, such as sabotage, pilfering, “goldbricking,” or “featherbedding” in the world of industry, or isolated protest and complaint, or yet absenteeism and abstention, etc. In this case, problems or experiences that are nonetheless common to all may remain in a state of confusedly shared malaise which is not constituted as political. (To give an idea of the sense of powerlessness that accompanies entrapment in serial, aggregative logic, it suffices to invoke the feelings experienced by the discontented readers of newspapers - which help to explain the vio-

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lence, well known to journalists, of many readers’ letters - or disap­ pointed radio listeners, or yet again dissatisfied television viewers, who are reduced to the isolated, passive act of zapping, homologous to abstention from voting.) It follows that the logic of the vote, which is ordinarily regarded as paradigmatically democratic, is doubly unfavorable to the domi­ nated. First, agents do not all possess to the same degree the instru­ ments, especially the cultural capital, necessary to produce what is called a personal opinion, in the twofold sense of autonomous and conforming to the particularity of the interests attached to a partic­ ular position (which means that the vote will truly become the uni­ versal suffrage it claims to be only when the conditions of access to the universal have been universalized). Second, the atomistic and aggregative mode of production dear to the liberal vision favors the dominant, who, because the structures of the social order operate in their favor, can be content with individual strategies (of reproduc­ tion), whereas the only chance for the dominated to break out of the dilemma of withdrawal (through abstention) and submission is to escape the logic of individual choice, for them profoundly alienating. But the lessons of historical experience, particularly that of the Soviet states, and the teachings of social analysis do not incline those who would seek a mode of formation of opinions that is as egalitar­ ian as possible - that is, capable of giving everyone an equal chance of producing and imposing opinions corresponding to their interests - to rely unconditionally on the other mode of production and expression of opinions, this one collective, that is based on delega­ tion to institutions especially designed to produce and express col­ lective claims, aspirations, or protests (such as associations, unions, or parties), and charged, at least officially, with the collective defense of the individual interests of their members.6 Thanks to the social technology of delegation, which confers on the authorized agent the proxy that gives him plena potentia agendi, the group re-presented finds itself constituted as such: now capable of acting and speaking “as one man,” it escapes from the powerlessness attached to serial atomization, and it can mobilize all the force, material and especially symbolic, that it contains in potentia. The impotent protest or insignificant desertion of the isolated individual, variants of serial action, that of the vote or of the market, which becomes effective only as a result of the blind and sometimes perverse mechanisms of statistical aggregation, give way to a contestation at once unitary and collective, coherent and potent. The members of a group hitherto united by a tacit agreement based on connivance, as Weber put it, a deep-seated complicity in suffering or in unexpressed, sometimes

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shameful malaise (as in the case of stigmatized populations), accedes to public existence and to political efficacy through words or sym­ bolic behaviors whose exemplar is the demonstration. Words - words which make explicit by making things visible and believable, or watchwords which make people act, and act in a concerted way are unifying principles of the situation and of the group, mobilizing signs making it possible to constitute the situation and to constitute it as something common to the group, thereby contributing to con­ stituting the group. This is true, at least according to the representa­ tions that the progressive tradition has constantly opposed to the myth of the “invisible hand,” and which are so many variants, themselves for a part mythical, of the Rousseauian figure of the “Legislator,” capable of embodying and expressing a “general will” irreducible to the “will of all” obtained by the mere summation of individual wills. By contrast with individual speech, shout, or protest, the speech of the spokesperson is an authorized speech that owes its authority to the fact that the person who speaks it draws his authority from the group which authorizes him to speak in its name. When the spokesperson speaks, it is a group that speaks through him, but one that exists as a group through that speech and its speaker. The spokesperson is a solution to the typically Durkheimian problem of the existence of the group beyond the biological obstacles correlative with the temporal and spatial limits inherent in the corporeality of individuals. One of the functions of the spokesperson and of the demonstration (manifestation) is to manifest the group that author­ izes the spokesperson. And an authorized spokesperson can display the force from which he derives his authority by calling on the group to mobilize and by effectively mobilizing it, thus leading it to mani­ fest itself (whence the importance attached to the number of demon­ strators). Authorized delegation is that which is capable of mobilizing the group that authorizes it, and thereby of manifesting the group as much for itself (by helping to maintain its morale and belief in itself) as for others. The most radical questioning of delegation comes from situations in which the antinomy inherent in the logic of its social functioning is revealed. Indeed, collective action founded on delegation is always haunted by the threat of usurpatory appropriation. Those responsi­ ble for the mobilization and manifestation of the group who, through speech or any other form of representation - verbal or enacted, the­ atrical - make tacit malaise and sufferings, unexpressed aspirations and expectations, pass from implicit to explicit state, to expressed, “publicized” opinion, Öffentlichkeit, enjoy an absolute power of

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creation since they make, in a certain way, the group exist as such by giving it a body, their own, a name, a sigle or “logo”7 as a quasimagical substitute for the group (in the manner of the sigillnm authenticum, the seal that guaranteed the validity of the solemn acts of royal power), words that are watchwords capable of manifesting it. To produce this effect, they must possess a power over the group that they derive from the group, a power of mobilization working as power to manifest the group as a visible and effective group, which they owe to the mobilized group upon which they wield that power. Through this power, which in addition reproduces the principle of its own efficacy, they assert and redouble the delegation of power of which they are the object. This misrecognized circular circulation of recognition is at the root of the capital and symbolic power that the mandated agent, as symbol exerting a symbolic action of reinforce­ ment of the symbol (like the flag and all the emblems of the group), holds over the group of which he is the embodied substitute, the incarnation. This symbolic capital is thus inevitably concentrated in his person, which, in and through its recognized existence (as dele­ gate, representative, president, minister, or secretary-general), tears the group from the non-existence of a mere aggregate, symbolized by the procession of voters isolated in the solitude of the polling booth (aptly called in French isoloir). If one adopts now the viewpoint of those who have no recourse but to delegate, one can see that they can accede, through the person of an other, to powerful and legitimate speech, known and recog­ nized, authorized and authoritative, only by running the risk of being dispossessed of speech, deprived of an expression that would be dis­ tinctively theirs, even of being denied, annulled in the singularity of their experience and of their specific interests by the common speech, the opinio communis such as is produced and proffered by their offi­ cial delegate. This happens in all cases where the ordinary members of corporate bodies - activists, subscribers, shareholders, and partic­ ularly of those mysterious collectives (I always like to recall that the canonists used to link ministerium with mysterium) that are especially set up to produce and express dissent and demands, such as parties and trade unions - are themselves placed before the dilemma of deser­ tion or protest, exit or voice, because of a discordance between what they have to say (which they may discover through this very dis­ cordance) and what is being said by the authorized speech of the spokespersons. In these cases, they can often escape from one or another form of serial powerlessness - that of “exit” or individual protest, or even that of the petition aimed at getting the delegates and spokespersons who, to crown it all, claim authority from them, to

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change their discourse and policy - only by instituting a new organ­ ization, itself exposed, as the holder of the monopoly of legitimate protest, to elicit new protests and new heretical desertions. Such is the antinomy faced by the Reformed Church, which, born of collec­ tive protest against the Church, sets up protest as the principle of a new Church, thereby inspiring new protest against itself. The same destiny befalls all the sects of the political world, “splinter groups,” wings, tendencies, and factions which, having issued out of scission, are fated to endless scissiparity. Is this antinomy insuperable? Is it possible to dominate the instru­ ments that had to be designed to escape from the dissident power­ lessness of atomized, detotalized existence, and even from the anarchy of individual strategies? How can the group master (or control) the opinion expressed by the spokesperson, the person who speaks on behalf of the group and in its name, but also in its stead, who makes the group exist by presenting and representing it but who, in a sense, holds or takes the place of the group? The fundamental, quasi-metaphysical question here,is what it means to speak for people who would not speak if someone did not speak for them, who can have as efficient strategies only collective strategies, founded on a col­ lective work of construction and expression of opinion. The only real way out of the mechanical addition of preferences effected by voting is to treat opinions not as things liable to being mechanically and passively added up, but as signs that can be changed by exchange, by discussion and confrontation, the problem being no longer that of choice, as in the liberal tradition, but of the choice of the collective mode of construction of choices (when a group, whatever it may be, has to produce an opinion, it is important for it to know that it first has to produce an opinion about the way to produce an opinion). To escape the mechanical aggregation of atomized opinions without falling into the antinomy of collective protest - and thus to make a decisive contribution to the construction of a genuine democracy one needs to work towards creating the social conditions for the establishment of a mode of fabrication of the “general will” (or of the collective opinion) that is genuinely collective, that is, based on the regulated exchanges of a dialectical confrontation presupposing agreement on the instruments of communication necessary for estab­ lishing agreement or disagreement and capable of transforming the contents communicated as well as those who communicate. (Translated by Richard Nice and Loïc Wacquant)

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Notes 1 Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Chamboredon, and Jean-Claude Passeron, The Craft o f Sociology: Epistemological Preliminaries (New York and Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991 [1968]). 2 Émile Durkheim, “Civic Morals,” in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957 [1912]), p. 105 (trans­ lation revised). 3 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 91. 4 Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). 5 Max Weber, Essais sur la théorie de la science (Paris: Plon, 1965), p. 369. 6 On this point see Pierre Bourdieu, “Delegation and Political Fetishism,” in Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity, 1991 [this essay 19851), pp. 203-19. 7 [In French sigle is a name in initials, often an acronym, which may also form a logogram. - Trans.]

4 Scholarship with Commitment: On the Political Engagements of Pierre Bourdieu Franck Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo

I run the risk of shocking those among [researchers] who, opting for the cozy virtuousness of confinement within their ivory tower, see inter­ vention outside the academic sphere as a dangerous failing of that famous “axiological neutrality” that is wrongly equated with scientific objectivity. . . . But I am convinced that we must at all costs bring the achievements of science and scholarship into public debate, from which they are tragically absent. Pierre Bourdieu, Preface to Contre-feux 2 (2001)

Pierre Bourdieu’s interventions since the mass strikes and dem on­ strations that rocked France in December of 1995 have been the object of oft-violent condemnations by the Parisian journalists and media intellectuals whose power he mercilessly dissected in his w rit­ ings on television and journalism .1 Bourdieu was then widely accused by established newspaper writers of “coming late” to political action and of abusing his scientific renown. But the sociologist’s engage­ ments with issues of overriding political import date from his entry into intellectual life, in the 1960s during the Algerian War of Independence.2 Since then, continual reflection on the “social con­ ditions of possibility” of his civic interventions has led him to separate himself as much from pedantic scientism as from blind

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faith in political spontaneity, still much in evidence among “free intellectuals.” Taken as a whole, Bourdieu’s trajectory recounts the genesis of a specifically political mode of intervention in which social science and civic activism, far from being opposed, can be construed as the two faces of the same coin of analysis and critique of social reality aimed at contributing to its transformation. It is a trajectory that illustrates how sociology itself is enriched by political engage­ ment and reflection on the social and intellectual conditions of this engagement: The time has come to transcend the old alternative of utopianism and sociologism in order to propose sociologically-based utopias. For this social scientists would have to succeed in collectively exploding the censorship they feel obliged to impose on themselves in the name of a truncated idea of scientificity. . . . The social sciences have purchased their access to the status of a science (in any case always disputed) by a formidable renunciation: through a self-censorship that constitutes a veritable self-mutilation, sociologists - myself for one, who has often denounced the temptation of prophetism and social philosophy - have made themselves refuse all attempts to propose an ideal and overar­ ching representation of the social world as failings of scientific ethics liable to discrediting their author.3

This manner of intervening into public debate implies the construc­ tion of a different point of view on politics: We live immersed in politics. We bathe in the immutable and chang­ ing stream of everyday chatter on the relative chances and merits of interchangeable candidates. We do not need to read the daily or weekly columnists or their books of essays that bloom at election time and go on to join the yellowed stock of used book dealers, fare for the histo­ rians of ideas, after a brief stint on the bestseller lists: on every radio and every television station their authors offer us “ideas” that are only so easy to receive because they are “received ideas,” preconceived notions already in everyone’s mind. Everything can be said and said again indefinitely, since in fact nothing is ever said. And our appointed debaters, who meet at the appointed hour to debate the strategy of such-and-such politician, the image or the silences of such-and-such another, tell the truth of the whole game when they express their hope that their interlocutor will not be in agreement “so there can be a debate.” Their talk of politics, like small talk about rain and good weather, are by nature vaporous, and continuous forgetting, which enables us to avoid discovering its extraordinary monotony, is what allows the game to go on.4

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The sociologist thus finds himself in conflict not only with the pro­ fessionals of the electoral realm (elected officials, party leaders and spokespersons, trade union delegates, etc.), but also with the profes­ sional political analysts and the semi-scholarly discourse on the res publica - those whom Bourdieu, reactivating an old notion of Aristotle, called the “doxosophists”: political journalists, media intel­ lectuals, and assorted essayists.5 If it is necessary on his view to break with this prefabricated discourse, it is not only because of its “scien­ tific mistakes” but also because of the commonplaces and mystifica­ tions they introduce into public debate. Needless to say, the rigorous sociological critique of their social function constitutes a veritable “offence against the norms of social decorum” since it entails trans­ gressing “the sacred frontier between culture and politics, pure thought and the triviality of the agora.”6 In the final analysis, Bourdieu’s interventions reveal the “ill-intended intention” of his work: to forge a sociology opposed to the cautions of academic propriety, which is inclined to retreat toward tried and tested objects [just as much as to] the false darings of essayism or the arrogant carelessness of prophetism: rejecting the alternative in which those who prefer to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron, or vice versa, lock themselves, that of sermonizing humanism taken for generosity and of disenchanted indifference aspir­ ing to lucidity, it aims to submit current issues [actualité], as much as possible, to the ordinary exigencies of scientific knowledge.7

This will to “politicize things by subjecting them to science” and to “think politics without for that thinking politically” is manifest from Bourdieu’s youthful works on Algerian society and history. And it is the whole of his sociology, as his lifelong companion from those days Abdelmalek Sayad once noted, that “bears the stamp of this first apprenticeship.”8

C olonial W a r and R evolutio n ary Consciousness

After a year of teaching philosophy in central France following his graduation from the École normale supérieure, Pierre Bourdieu arrived in Algeria in 1955 to do his military service. He then took up a post as assistant professor in philosophy in the Faculty of Letters of the Uni­ versity of Algiers until April 1960, when the pro-colonialist coup forced him into exile and Raymond Aron rescued him by offering him a teaching position at the Sorbonne. During this turbulent period, marked by the escalating conflict between the ascending Algerian

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nationalist movement and the colonial authorities, he undertook eth­ nological studies in Kabylia and other war-torn regions under condi­ tions his student and collaborator Abdelmalek Sayad described as precarious and dangerous. What Bourdieu later characterized as “the shock of Algeria”9 provoked him to write his first book, The Algeri­ ans, in 1958, “in an activist logic” - the American edition, published by Beacon Press in 1962 with a preface by Aron, showed an Algerian flag on the cover even though independence had not yet been pro­ claimed - illuminated by a knowledge of Algerian reality that very few French intellectuals shared then.10 Bourdieu’s first two interventions in the public debate on the colo­ nial war, then France’s paramount political issue, were published in 1961 by the journal Esprit and in 1962 by Les Temps modernes two of the most influential intellectual publications of the day, though Bourdieu did not necessarily share the orientation of either.11 Build­ ing on a full command of the historical and ethnographic literature and drawing on the results of several months of fieldwork, these texts sought to break with an apolitical use of anthropology by making it an instrument of symbolic struggle. They dissected the destructive effects of the colonial encounter by refusing “axiological neutrality” as a pretext for disengagement.12 Rejecting both verbal radicalism and principled humanist con­ demnation, which made the Algerian revolution the object of abstract debates in the métropole, the scientific yet engaged posture adopted by Bourdieu from the start led him to analyze the conditions of access to revolutionary consciousness. He saw the war as a crucible that revealed the latent relations of violence constitutive of the colonial system: war did not oppose “enemies” so much as it exposed the revolt of the dominated society against this structure of domination. Neither a civil war nor a war between nations, the Algerian conflict did not exhaust itself in the confrontation of one class against another because it took aim at the caste system as such - with arms that, for the first time on a collective scale, were not only symbolic. Accord­ ing to Bourdieu, this “revolution” in turn revolutionized the society that produced it to the extent that it made traditional ways lose the character of naturalness that seemed inherently attached to them, and imposed on all an uprooting that resembles the experience of the immigrant. The transposition of ethnographic methods honed in colonial Algeria to the study of French society, notably to the peasants of his native Béarn and to the educational system, would transgress not only disciplinary boundaries but also the mental barriers that a society erects against all self-examination. Bourdieu’s early writings on Algeria thus afforded the young scholar much more than an ethno-

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logical “detour”: they fostered a veritable conversion of his intellec­ tual vision.

Education and th e L e g itim a tio n o f D o m in a tio n

After a stint as an Assistant Professor at the University of Lille (1961-4), Bourdieu returned to Paris as Director of Studies at the École pratique des hautes études. There he took up the position of Secretary-General of the Center for European Sociology (CSE), launched by Raymond Aron in 1960 with monies from American foundations. During these years, a research group was formed that undertook a range of studies on the educational system, intellectuals, and cultural practices connected to museums and photography; several studies and collective works were published during those years, the best-known being Photography: A Middle-Brow A rt and The Love o f Art on social access to European museums.13 The year 1964 saw the creation of thé series “Le sens com mun” at Éditions de Minuit, in response to the need for an autonomous publishing structure whose editorial policy would be at once scien­ tifically ambitious and careful to escape erudite confinement so as to open itself up to a larger readership. T hat same year Bourdieu pub­ lished in the series The Inheritors with Jean-Claude Passeron - a book that Raymond Aron would later describe as one of the catalysts of May ’68. During the turmoil of May, Aron allowed the CSE to be the mailbox for the “Committee for the Defense and Renewal of the French University,” a group of conservative academics bent on defending the academic and social status quo in the face of widening social protests. In reaction, a year later, Bourdieu set up a separate team of researchers with their own program of investigations - the Center for the Sociology of Education and Culture (CSEC). The Center participated in its way in the events of May ’68. One of its major interventions was an “Appeal for the Organization of Estates General for Education and Research.” The idea of an “estates general,” taken up again 30 years later in 1996 and 2000,14 referred to a collective way of claims-making that was not to be confused with a “discussion among the beneficiaries of the system” and would not replicate the exclusion of those who, eliminated from higher educa­ tion, were by definition deprived of the means of contesting its organ­ ization. In subsequent years, Bourdieu returned to the crisis of the “university order” that had exploded in 1968 and analyzed w hat had determined its limits: the reform of the most visibly authoritarian

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aspects of the academic system did not make the authoritarian struc­ ture of the “pedagogical relation” and its power to legitimate inequal­ ities disappear.15 The spontaneity with which the “leaders of May” had spoken out must not obscure the fact that the political positions defended by the students and lower-ranking academics derived from their objective interests in the academic world.16 Much as the studies brought together in Academic Discourse: Lin­ guistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power show “the decisive role of linguistic inheritance in academic success,” The Inheritors starts from the statistical connection between social origins and rates of educational success to demonstrate that the school system favors those who are best endowed with cultural capital by virtue of their class background.17 The apparent neutrality of the school allows it to convert social differences into academic differences by making properties acquired in the bosom of the family pass for “natural gifts.” In a society where obtaining social privileges depends increas­ ingly on the possession of university credentials, this ideology of the gift, whereby those who “inherit” become those who “merit,” fulfills an essential legitimizing function for the social order. This thesis, first stated in 1964 in The Inheritors, was elaborated both theoretically and empirically in Reproduction. Upon its publication in 1970, this book was vigorously attacked in the public sphere, including by left intellectuals, for its alleged “fatalistic vision” of schools and society - for many school-trained scholars, its questioning of the basis of their social privilege was not acceptable, nor was the empirical defla­ tion of the fashionable ideology of the “liberating school.” It was also during these years that a series of studies of the various Grandes écoles (elite graduate schools in which entry is by national competi­ tive examination) and of the system they form were initiated within the CSE and then the CSEC. These studies would lead to the publi­ cation in 1989 of The State Nobility, whose prologue insists on the political import of the academic institution and therefore of the sociology of education.18

Against the Science of Political Dispossession In January 1971, Bourdieu gave a paper entitled “Public Opinion Does Not Exist” which is foundational in several respects: its decon­ struction of the production of public opinion polls and critique of their social uses takes on at once the researchers who conduct them and the politicians who turn them into arguments of authority.19

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Reckoning with non-responses to polls raises the question of the competencies required to talk politically about politics and the dis­ possession suffered by those who rely on mandated delegates to make their political claims.20 The critique of the indiscriminate use of “public opinion” by the discipline of political science constituted, according to Bourdieu, a defense of the autonomy of sociology at the very moment when researchers found themselves increasingly subor­ dinated to political and administrative demands, and dominated by a pole of applied research whose main representative in the 1970s was Jean Stoetzel, a social psychologist who had imported US-made techniques of surveys into France.21 Bourdieu further elaborated the political foundations of his cri­ tique in a paper delivered to the French Political Science Association in November 1973, where he took up a distinction introduced by Émile Durkheim between an electoral outcome that results from the mere addition of individual votes and one that expresses “something collective.” Bourdieu’s central argument here was that “the essential and most hidden principle of dispossession resides in the aggregation of opinions.” What should command out' attention is not the aggre­ gate but the process of aggregation, that is, the relationship between the opinion and the mode of existence of the social group - which explains the importance of novel forms of political demonstrations (sit-ins, boycotts, etc.) whereby mobilized groups resist the dispos­ session of their voice. It was for these reasons that, from that moment onward, Bourdieu deemed it necessary to forge an alliance between researchers and activists. By uncovering the hidden springs of domi­ nation, scientific analysis is capable of becoming an instrument of self-understanding and (relative) emancipation on behalf of a social movement: Liberal philosophy identifies political action with solitary, even silent and secret, action, whose paradigm is voting, the “purchase” of a party offering in the secrecy of the voting booth. In so doing, it reduces the group to the series, the mobilized opinion of an organized or solidary collective to the statistical aggregation of individually expressed opin­ ions. One thinks of the utopia of Milton Friedman, who, in order to capture the points of view of families on schooling, suggests distrib­ uting tokens allowing them to buy educational services furnished by competing enterprises. . . . Political action finds itself reduced to a form of economic action. The logic of the market, or of voting, which is to say the aggregation of individual strategies, imposes itself whenever groups are reduced to the state of aggregates - or, if you prefer, when­ ever they are demobilized.22

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The intellectual legitimacy that polling - “this science without a scientist” - lends to the mechanisms of domination was for Bourdieu the crux of his critique of the “doxosophists,” the professional man­ ufacturers of opinion who produce an ideology conforming to the interests of the dominant. Political critique must therefore be accom­ panied by a sociology of intellectuals wielded as a symbolic weapon against pseudo-scholarly justifications of the social order: “Political-scientization” is one of the most effective techniques of depoliticization. . . . [It] is one of the weapons in the struggle between the forces of depoliticization and the forces of politicization, forces of subversion of the ordinary order and adhesion to this order - whether it be the unselfconscious adhesion that defines doxa or elective adhe­ sion, which characterizes orthodoxy, opinion or right-thinking and, if you like, thinking of the right.23

The critique of “political science” and of the “doxosophists” thus partakes of a broader analysis of the threats that weigh on the auton­ omy of the intellectual field in general, and on the sociological field in particular, in a period, the seventies, during which many of France’s high-level state managers had put themselves at the service of the “modernization” of French capitalism, that is, the revamping of its symbolic mechanisms of reproduction. These transformations in­ creased the hold of political powers on the intellectual world: posi­ tioned midway between intellectuals stripped of temporal power and men of power whose authority rests increasingly on specific expert­ ise, a new population of “administrative researchers” and “scientific administrators” who belong to scholarly institutions directly answer­ ing to the dictates of the state had developed which acted as agents of heteronomy inside the scientific field itself.24 The launching of the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, whose inaugural issue appeared in 1975, was intended to contribute to bolstering the autonomy of sociology by providing it with an independent means of dissemination capable of reaching beyond the closed university milieu, yet subject only to the necessi­ ties of procedures of empirical verification and scientific critique. Animated by the will to break with academic formalism and the normalizing standardization of social science research, its editorial line called for the juxtaposition of “finished” scholarly articles, research notes, statistical data, field documents, photos, facsimiles, and even cartoons.2;> This scientific policy for sociology sought not only to “deconstruct” the “sacred” texts of the scholarly world, but

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also “to destroy the false pretenses and evasions forged by a religious vision of man, over which the revealed religions have no monopoly.” Effecting a “reversal of the hierarchy of consecrated research objects” by a science traditionally so dependent upon political demands as sociology, in which scientific censorship is very often nothing but con­ cealed political censorship, Actes de la recherche endeavored to over­ turn the opposition between “the priesthood of the great academic orthodoxy” and “the distinguished heresy of the sharp-shooters who fire blanks.”26 The diversity of methods deployed in the journal thus joined a variety of themes which even today are seldom considered worthy of full-fledged sociological study: high fashion, the autom o­ bile, cartoons, vocational education, the army, social workers, the rhetoric of Marxism, etc.

P olitical D is e n c h a n tm e n t and th e R e a l p o l i t i k o f Reason

On the threshold of the 1980s, texts published by Bourdieu on the political field dissected the separation between political professionals and the politically profane that reinforces the logic of the apparatus and leads to the closure of the political world onto itself: Silence about the conditions that place citizens, all the more brutally as they are more economically and culturally deprived, before the alter­ native of resignation through abstention or dispossession through delegation is to “political science” what silence about the economic and cultural conditions of “rational” economic conduct is to the science of economics. Any analysis of political struggle must take as its foundation the economic and social determinants of the division of political labor at its foundation, lest it naturalizes the social mecha­ nisms that produce and reproduce the break between “politically active agents” and “politically passive agents” [as Weber says] and consti­ tutes into eternal laws historical regularities valid within the limits of a determinate state of the structure of the distribution of capital, and in particular cultural capital.27

It was an international event that spectacularly revealed the con­ sequences of such closure of the national political field onto itself. In Poland, on the night of December 12, 1981, the troops of General Jaruzelski, supported by the USSR, moved in on the Solidarnosc trade union and arrested many of its leaders. Faced with France’s absence of official reaction to Jaruzelski’s subsequent declaration of a state of

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siege, Bourdieu suggested that major public voices join to sign an appeal to put pressure on the Socialist government to denounce Poland’s turn to Soviet-style repression. He drew up the initial appeal jointly with Michel Foucault. Meetings, declarations, and demon­ strations followed, provoking violent reactions on the part of the Socialist government and its spokespersons suddenly faced with this mode of “recalcitrant cooperation.”28 After he was elected to the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France in 1982, Bourdieu amplified his sociology of intellectuals with Homo Academicus, which put forth a thorough analysis of the deter­ minants of the political engagements of scholars as sifted through the prism of their academic positions, trajectories, and strategies. Against the double bind constituted by the contestation of academic hierar­ chies in the name of “democratization” and the defense of these hier­ archies in the name of the quality of teaching - “a couple of forces that encourages the status quo when it comes to what really matters” - the sociologist affirmed the necessity of reexamining the place of scientific work in the university, which the reforms of the day would not allow to be considered.29 Written under the collective aegis of the Collège de France at the request of President François Mitterrand, the report, entitled “Propositions for an Education of the Future,” was for Bourdieu the occasion to fuse his scientific work on school­ ing and his academic impulses rooted in his position as a “conse­ crated heretic.”30 The report generated considerable public discussion but was swiftly tabled by a Socialist government that had no inten­ tion of truly reforming education. Yet it was translated and widely debated in several neighboring countries, where some of its recom­ mendations were put into practice. If Bourdieu later proved very crit­ ical of the uses that were made of the report (it was reduced, in his eyes, to a “little something extra in the ‘Letter from the President of the Republic to the French people’ ” sent by Mitterrand to all French voters during the 1988 presidential campaign), he nonetheless agreed in 1989 to preside over an official Commission on the Contents of Education set up by Lionel Jospin, then Minister of Education in the government of Michel Rocard during the second Mitterrand presi­ dency.31 The seven “Principles for a Reflection on the Contents of Instruction” put forth by the Gros-Bourdieu commission proposed to restructure the divisions of knowledge and the conditions of its transmission so as to enable pedagogy to reach a broader spectrum of students. But again the relations of power inside the Socialist gov­ ernment were such that the report was left fallow. Bourdieu’s participation in such government-sponsored commis­ sions and reports by no means prevented him from remaining atten-

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tive to the social movements that were then shaking French schools and society. Indeed, the decade of the 1980s witnessed the emergence of unconventional forms of protest - nurses’ actions in 1986, a teach­ ers’ strike against the redistribution of power in primary schools in 1987, and several student mass protests. During the student mobi­ lizations Bourdieu gave an interview that provided him with an opportunity to criticize the policies of the governments of both Right and Left and the absence of a political project for a school system that had been handed over wholesale to the neoliberal ideology of competition.32 These perspectives on current politics - state expertise and social movements - run through the analysis of the structure and function­ ing of the “field of power” set out in 1989 in The State Nobility: struggles among the dominant over the conservation or transforma­ tion of elite academic institutions entrusted with the “reproduction of the field of power” both express and mask a struggle over control of the state as the ultimate “bank of symbolic power.” But at the same time these struggles paradoxically “inject into the field of power a little of that universal - reason, disinterestedness, civic-mindedness, etc. - that, issued from earlier struggles, is always a symbolically effective weapon in the struggles of the moment.”33 Yet this gradual and irregular “progress toward the universal” does not fill the gap between, on the one hand, the state bureaucracy (whose legitimacy resides in the possession of academic credentials) and political pro­ fessionals (who govern “with an eye trained on public opinion polls”) and, on the other, those who “protest outside the established frame­ works” - to whom the ethnographic interviews and analyses pre­ sented in The Weight o f the World would later be devoted with the intention of inciting to “another way of doing politics.”34 Appearing in 1993, this 1,000-page collective dissection of new forms of “social misery” in French society quickly became a reference work for social activists and achieved enormous public success: it has sold some 100,000 copies and was adapted for full-length theatrical play as well as video. Bourdieu’s Postscript to The Weight o f the World directly addressed the closing onto itself of the political microcosm and its disregard for the coarse realities of the social world. Its title seemed to echo critically Prime Minister Michel Rocard, who, under electoral pressure from the extreme right National Front on the “immigration problem,” had declared in Le Monde on August 24, 1990: “France cannot accommodate all the misery of the world [la misère du monde, the book’s title in French - Trans.], but it should shoulder its part of the burden faithfully.” Contrary to a common misreading, such analyses of the changing forms and modalities of the exercise of power in advanced societies

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do not lead to passivity or resignation. If social groups have worked to establish the rule of law, the idea of public service, the general interest, it is because they have reaped some of the benefits of uni­ versalization. For Bourdieu, an effective and realistic politics must thus consist in enlarging this principle of “interest in the universal” to other social universes and in devising institutional structures such that political agents acquire an interest in pursuing virtuous strate­ gies benefiting the citizenry at large: Political ethics cannot fall from heaven: it is not inscribed in human nature. Only a Realpolitik of reason and morality can contribute to fostering the institution of universes wherein all social agents would be subjected - in particular through the agency of critique - to a kind of permanent test of universality. . . . [Mjorality has no chance of coming about, especially in politics, unless one works to create the institutional means for a politics of morality. The official truth of the official, the cult of public service and of devotion to the commonweal, cannot resist the critique of suspicion that everywhere uncovers cor­ ruption, misplaced ambition, clientelism, or, in the best-case scenario, a vested interest in serving the public goodA

The role of social critique proves crucial in forcing political leaders to be what their social function enjoins them to be, that is, to reduce the “gap between the official and the effective,” and “create the con­ ditions for the institution of the rule of civic virtue.”36 However, this critique of electoral politics and state bureaucracies does not lead merely to revealing the social suffering engendered by neoliberal poli­ cies implemented by the Left itself.37 In Bourdieu’s work it comes associated with a continual reflection on the social and political conditions of the political action of intellectuals, whose autonomy is threatened by the hold of a “technocracy of communication” that reinforces the monopoly of political professionals over public debate.

Waging Struggles at the European Level: Reinventing a Collective Intellectual As international equilibria got overturned by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the construction of the European Union, Bourdieu held that the struggles of intellectuals must more than ever be collective and international. In this perspective, the launching of the journal Liber represented an attempt to reactivate at the European level the tradi­ tion of the intellectual on the model of the Enlightenment ency-

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clopédistes. As early as 1985 Bourdieu had formulated the premises of this enterprise within the framework of the College of European Artists and Scholars, where he had envisioned the creation of a European Review o f Books in which intellectuals could assert their specific norms, over and against the twin pressures of the market and the national state. The first ambition of Liber, an “International Review of Books,” was to diffuse avant-garde literary, artistic, and scientific works to a broad transnational audience by thwarting the self-enclosure of these worlds and by “overcoming the temporal gaps and misunderstandings tied to linguistic barriers, the slowness of translations,. . . and the inertia of academic traditions.”38 The journal was first distributed as a quarterly supplement to major national dailies in several countries and, at one point, appeared nearsimultaneously in a dozen countries. In France, Le M onde was its first supporter, but when the newspaper sought to gain control over its contents, Bourdieu took Liber back and made it a companion to Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Until its closing in 1999, the journal steadfastly went against the current of “the un­ discussed beliefs of academic orthodoxy, 'so powerful in these times of restoration.”39 The editorial line of Liber was distinctive for the place it gave to artists and writers whose works are vectors of political critique. The collapse of the USSR, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the foibles of nation­ alism, and the reunification of Germany were among the themes addressed by the journal. In some of the early issues, Jürgen Habermas analyzed the noxious effects of the reunification process; Bourdieu returned to the crumbling of Sovietism and to the grim real­ ities of the functioning of a regime that betrayed the emancipatory project it initially bore; he also wrote on the “false alternatives” (socialism versus liberalism) utilized on behalf of political restora­ tion.40 The aim of the journal on these and other topics of wide civic concern was to use history, sociology, and literature as instruments of collective self-knowledge in order to check the regressive impulses that often underlie the political actions of artists, scholars, and philosophers. The collective socioanalysis which Bourdieu called for aims to detect the traps that history has bequeathed and sedimented in common language; its purpose is to enable us to gain degrees of freedom by opening the way to a realistic internationalism that will overcome the obstacles inherited from past national conflicts and establish structures of communication liable to foster the institution of the universal.41 This Realpolitik of reason inspired the call for a “Corporatism of the Universal,” first given as a lecture in 1989 in Milan and later

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rewritten into the conclusion of The Rules o f Art.41 For Bourdieu it was again a question of reinforcing the autonomy of the intellectual field that was constructed at the end of the nineteenth century against religious, political, and economic powers - an autonomy now threat­ ened by the increasing interpenetration of the worlds of art and money, the generalized recourse to private sponsors to finance scien­ tific research, and the growing weight of commercial constraints on enterprises of cultural production and dissemination. New forms of struggle therefore had to be invented, such as the “International of the Intellectuals” to which Bourdieu devoted himself in the first half of the 1990s. Establishing such a “critical counter-power” by organ­ izing “a concrete solidarity with threatened writers” and establishing “a locus for reflection on new forms of engagement”: such was the object of the appeal delivered in Strasbourg in November 1993, ini­ tiated by Bourdieu and signed by Jacques Derrida, Edouard Glissant, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, and Salman Rushdie, for the creation of an International Parliament of Writers.43 In February 1994, Rushdie was elected to the presidency of the new group, which acquired a deliberative and executive body composed of 50 members, and a charter defining the organization’s principles, obligations, and forms of action: independence from established power, recognition of the diversity of historical traditions in order to escape the “prophetism of the old universal conscience” denouncing the “major issues of the hour” as defined by the media, anonymous and collec­ tive contributions, etc. Among the achievements of the IPW, one notes the creation of a network of 400 safe havens (spread across 34 coun­ tries) and the organization of international press conferences about Rwanda, Algeria, Sarajevo, asylum rights, etc. It was an ambitious project, within which Bourdieu nonetheless opposed to “the figure of the intellectual as the self-proclaimed bearer of universal conscience” the role, construed as much more modest, of “functionary of human­ ity” (an expression he borrowed from Edmund Husserl).44 Two initiatives launched at the beginning of the 1990s on the issues of higher education and Algeria allowed Bourdieu to put his con­ ception of the collective work of intellectuals into practice. In March 1992, an appeal to the research and teaching community led to the creation of a collective, the Association for Reflection on Higher Edu­ cation and Research (Association de Réflexion sur les Enseignements Supérieurs et la Recherche, ARESER), with Bourdieu acting as pres­ ident and historian Christophe Charle as secretary. Against the dys­ functions of the bureaucratic decision-making process, and especially the loss of control and authority by specialists who let “scientific administrators” set the objectives and modalities of teaching, the

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ARESER collected documents, organized debates, and produced texts aimed at establishing rigorous “diagnoses and urgent remedies for a university in peril” - as indicated by the title of the first work pub­ lished by the collective in 1997.45 Cast as the “extreme limit of all the social and political problems that a researcher and intellectual can encounter,” the resurging Algerian predicament became for Bourdieu the focus of collective work with the International Committee of Support for Algerian Intel­ lectuals (Comité International de Soutien aux Intellectuels Algériens, or CISIA), created in June 1993 to aid scholars, journalists, teachers, and writers who had become the object of attacks and assassinations since the outbreak of the Algerian civil war. In connection with the International Parliament of Writers, the CISIA sought first of all to facilitate the exile of the most threatened intellectuals and then to counter the isolation of those cut off from all information by vio­ lence. It set as its objective alerting public opinion, in “total inde­ pendence from governments, institutions, and parties,” to the assault on lives and liberties under way in Algeria, and it took a public posi­ tion in favor of a “party of civil peace,” “toward which the Novem­ ber 1995 presidential elections that brought Liamine Zeroual to power would later seem to be leading. But the CISIA also aimed, against the “cold political analysis” and the “indecent humanist preaching” of media intellectuals,46 to provide tools for understand­ ing the present situation, in particular by showing that “Islam is not, by nature, incompatible with the rule of law.”47 Against the collec­ tive repression rooted in the colonial heritage, a work of recovery of the country’s “historical unconscious” shows that the collective lie of the Algerian ruling class, together with the regression to barbarism for which France furnished the model during the Algerian War of Independence, find their roots in the colonial era in the structural subordination of culture to politics. The texts produced by Bourdieu on this issue thus constantly reaffirm the need to establish basic politi­ cal and cultural liberties, all the while criticizing the measures of the French government restricting immigration from its former colony.48

In S u p p o rt o f Social M ovem ents: F ro m D e c e m b e r 1995 to R a is o n s d ’a g ir

A catalyst for resistance to the spread of neoliberal policies, the massive social movement of December 1995 resulted from the con­ junction of several crises: a student protest that started in November

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and was soon joined by the mobilization of activist networks in higher education; a public transit strike in response to the announce­ ment of a government plan for reduction of rail service and a reform of the railroad employees’ retirement system, which contributed to blocking traffic and the activities of large towns and cities; and, finally, after the November 15 announcement of a plan to curtail national health and social protection schemes which mandated the reduction of public expenditures, the development of widespread popular protest against the Juppé government.49 Faced with these mobilizations, the directors of the Saint-Simon Foundation and the Catholic center-left journal Esprit launched a public petition drive in support of the governmental measures,50 “For a Reform of the Social Safety System,” condemning both the alleged archaism of the medical coverage system and those who rejected Juppé’s plan for welfare retrenchment. In support of the strikers, Bourdieu joined in writing a major call for an initiative by academics close to activist circles that appeared in Le Monde on December 5 as mass protest was starting to build up.51 The December 12 demonstration, in which nearly two million marched the streets of France, ended with a public meeting at the Gare de Lyon in Paris during which the sociologist stepped to the fore to defend public services threatened by neoliberal policies of state withdrawal and commodification of public services. In his speech before throngs of railroad workers, striking wage earners, and other activists, Bourdieu denounced the action of a “state nobility that preaches the withering away of the state and the undivided reign of the market and the consumer.”52 Against the experts who called on the authority of the lofty science of economics to justify draconian cuts in welfare, Bourdieu affirmed his support for those whom the technocratic elites disparaged as a people dominated by irrational and insatiable “desires” to whom rational policies have to be dictated from above - as suggested among others by philosopher Paul Ricoeur and sociologist Alain Touraine.55 The successive French governments of the nineties thus became the direct object of Bourdieu’s critical analyses. The targets of his interventions included immigration policy, with the infamous “Pasqua-Debré laws” which authorized racial and ethnic profiling in police and administrative processing; the refusal to regularize undoc­ umented aliens, which in 1996 gave rise to an important grass-roots mobilization in direct continuity with the December 1995 movement; the Left’s silence in the struggle of homosexuals for full civil equal­ ity; and the media operations launched by Socialist Minister of Edu­ cation Claude Allègre to hide the pro-market bend of his policies.

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Bourdieu tried to bring the full weight of his scientific renown, often in association with other leading intellectuals, in support of activists situated at the avant-garde of protest54 as well as those who, after the return of the Socialists to government in 1997, saw the policies of the newly formed Jospin government as a betrayal of the ideals of the Left. In January of 1998, Bourdieu intervened publicly in favor of the movement of the unemployed, whose forms of direct action, initiated by an active cadre of activists, captured media attention. The occupation of the École normale supérieure - France’s traditional breeding ground of top intellectuals and Bourdieu’s own alma mater - gave him an opportunity to emphasize the “social miracle” of the mobilization of those who tend to be atomized and disorganized by their very situation of economic exclusion and social detachment.55 Support of the cause of the unemployed allowed for the denuncia­ tion of the generalized precariousness brought on by neoliberal policy: the “objective insecurity” that affects the world of labor is the basis of the “subjective insecurity” that affects those employed no less than those pushed out of the; wage-labor sphere and fosters the implementation of flexibility as the basis for a new mode of economic domination.56 Beyond these specific intercessions into public debate, Bourdieu sought to make a lasting mark by shaping the organizational form and means of intellectual action. While the initiative of the Estates General of the Social Movement did not lead to significant results after 1996, it put Bourdieu’s notion of the “collective intellectual” into action by bringing together researchers with similar civic orien­ tations. Thus was Raisons d ’agir (Reasons to Act) created, a collec­ tive intended to place the analytical expertise of social scientists and other scholars at the service of movements opposing neoliberal poli­ cies and to counterbalance the influence of conservative think tanks then mushrooming throughout Europe. Relying on the public success of The Weight o f the World and on the collective work that fed it, this group composed mainly of sociologists, historians, and econo­ mists close to Pierre Bourdieu sought to engage as such in the sym­ bolic struggles against the imposition of a neoliberal doxa by experts, especially mainline economists and political scientists. Sociological work, which makes visible that which escapes the ordinary percep­ tion of the social world, thus served as a basis for the collective’s political interventions in the press and through conferences, public debates, training seminars, and publications. To diffuse “intellectual weapons of resistance,” Bourdieu also created a publishing house, Liber-Raisons d’agir, to put out a series of low-cost books intended to offer works of engaged social science to a broad educated public

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in an accessible form, as well as analyses censored or marginalized by the dominant media - starting with those dealing with the media itself. Among the first titles in that series that immediately took a promi­ nent place in public debate upon its launching are Bourdieu’s On Television (1996) and Les Nouveaux chiens de garde (The New Watchdogs, 1997) by Serge Halimi, a journalist at Le Monde diplo­ matique who holds a Berkeley Ph.D. in political science. The sales of the former have exceeded 150,000 copies, while those of The New Watchdogs (a direct reference to Julien Benda’s famous 1930s broad­ side Les Chiens de garde) reached 100,000 copies in less than six months in spite of the complete blackout in which the mainstream media kept the volume. These books began to spread a critique of the journalistic field that extended empirical analyses carried out by Bourdieu and his collaborators many years earlier.

The Media, Servant of the “ Conservative Revolution” Bourdieu’s first works on the emergence of “journalist-intellectuals” date from the mid-seventies and his fuller analysis of the submission of journalism to the pressures of the market from the eighties.57 On the occasion of a debate reflecting back on the coverage of the 1991 Gulf War, the journalists of Reporters sans frontières (Journalists without Borders) invited the sociologist, who proceeded to dissect their unconscious and often unseen contribution to the naturalization of the dominant vision of the social world; a major news magazine reported the meeting and broadcast Bourdieu’s analysis. But the appearance of On Television in 1996 sparked a vitriolic media cam­ paign against the sociologist, mobilizing the largest national dailies and weeklies for several months, during which period the book topped the bestseller list.58 The sociological analysis of the constraints weighing on journalistic work - urgency, consensus, mandatory cross-reference to the work of rivals, etc. - reveals how the growing subjection of the media to the exigencies of the audimat (the French equivalent of the Nielsen ratings) contributes to the ambient “polit­ ical disenchantment.” But, whereas Bourdieu’s scientific texts had been relatively little read, On Television broke the barrier of schol­ arly esotericism and put a sociological understanding of the media in the hands of a broad audience. Besides the paradoxical “publicity” effects engendered by the violence of the concerted attacks launched

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on Bourdieu by France’s leading columnists, the impact of the pub­ lications by Raisons d’agir can be explained by the resurgence of social struggles as well as by the increasing attention directed toward the decline of professional standards and the pressure of commer­ cialism among the French national media. Political disenchantment, marketing methods, and submission to the competitive market were all themes that motivated Bourdieu’s fall 1999 participation in an action, initiated by ACRIMED (an associa­ tion formed by scholars and activists devoted to the critique and democratization of the mass media), to defend France Culture (the French equivalent of the PBS), which had just been subjected to a programming reform based on ‘“ recipes’ believed to have been made for the success of public and private stations” but which have trans­ formed public radio into a “barely disguised” instrument “for the promotion of the most commercially-oriented books, records, and films.”59 The sociologist’s attention to the operation of the main­ stream public media at the service of market thinking came above all from the fact that this constitutes an obstacle to progressive struggles: One of the major obstacles to the constitution of forces of resistance is the fact that the dominant control the media as never before in history. . . . Nowadays, all the large French newspapers are completely controlled. Even papers that maintain the appearance of independence, like Le Monde, are in fact shareholder associations ruled by moneyed interests.60

Beyond the critique of the media, it is the social movement as an “international of resistance to neoliberalism and to all forms of con­ servatism” that is the basis of all the questions Bourdieu addresses to the “masters of the world, [holders of] these new powers born of the conjugated forces of money and the media.”61 Engaged with the international swirl of the neoliberal counterrevolution seeking to put the economy in power everywhere, Bour­ dieu supplemented his analyses of the social effects of economic logics with a sociology of the social and political foundations of the economy. In The Social Structures o f the Economy, the sociologist gathers and reworks various strands of a large-scale study of France’s single-homes market conducted in the early 1990s. The book joins a historical analysis of how the French state first constructed and then reshaped the market for housing after the 1970s with the elaboration of general “principles for an economic anthropology” arraigned against the “ahistorical vision of the science of economics.”62 Along-

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side this exploration of the political making of capitalist economic institutions, the sociologist refined his earlier analyses of the “social genesis of the economic habitus” in the colonial society of Algeria and the dangers of the “scholastic fallacy” in the analysis of economic behavior - themes that run through his texts on the “economy of practices” since his first critique of structuralism formulated in his study of the strategies of peasants of Béarn,63 first formalized in Outline o f a Theory o f Practice (1972) and then taken up again in The Logic o f Practice (1980), before making way for a full-blown critique of scholastic reason in Pascalian Meditations (1997). Faced with the constitution of a global economic space unified according to the logic of capital concentration conforming to the interests of the “conservative international of the top executives and managers of multinational corporations” (and relayed by the actions of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization), Bourdieu expressed public support for various movements mobilizing against neoliberal globalization during the mass demonstrations of Nice (December 2000) and Québec City (April 2001). The relative success of these struggles did not prevent him from staying alert to other international opportunities for intervention within collective frame­ works. He challenged frontally the complicitous silence of national and international authorities in light of the “bloodbath” authorized and even fomented by the upper echelons of the Algerian army and state, and he supported initiatives against the wars that punctuated the nineties in the Gulf and the Balkans. These stances should be seen within the framework of Bourdieu’s analyses of an international situation in which “the global community has given carte blanche to the United States to enforce a particular kind of order” wherein “rela­ tions of force overwhelmingly favor the dominant” and “might alone makes right.”64 For the sociologist, that such a transnational balance of power can be presented as a natural necessity is the result of “twenty years of work by conservative think tanks and their allies in the political and journalistic fields,” who have invented a “new plan­ etary vulgate” whose intentions and impact on collective conscious­ ness must urgently be unmasked.65 It was, however, at the European level that Bourdieu located the privileged ground for a renewal of civic struggles, to which he devoted an article that appeared in Le Monde diplomatique in June 1999 in which he criticizes the fact that the construction of Europe is “so far little more than [a work of] social destruction”66 of social collectives designed to make way for the reign of the market. The “Appeal for Estates General of the European Social Movement,”

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symbolically published on May 1, 2000 (international Labor Day) in several major European and Latin American dailies, simultaneously constituted another initiative to try and regroup anti-capitalist activists at the European level in a structure similar to the French social movements of the nineties, characterized, according to Bour­ dieu, by the rejection of traditional forms of political mobilization an influence of the self-management movement favoring grass-roots participation and privileging direct action.67 Founded on the stern rejection of any political co-optation of the libertarian tradition of the Left that was reactivated by the “Appeal for the Autonomy of the Social Movement,”68 Bourdieu’s interven­ tions during the closing years of the 1990s have consistently intended to spur political action backed by practical activist knowledge and to foster the emergence of a coordinating committee articulating the diverse social movements and unions of Europe that would escape the hold - and also the compromises - of institutions for which the European Trade Union Confederation supplies the model. To this end, the meetings with trade union leaders, activists, and progressive intellectuals held in Vienna in November 2000 and Athens in May 2001 aimed at instituting a form of political work intent on escap­ ing the logics of both political meeting and academic conference.69 This compressed recapitulation spanning three decades shows that Pierre Bourdieu’s political interventions cannot be separated from his scientific writings, even if the reading of his works has too often been neutralized by their academic conditions of reception. For they effectively put his sociological thought into practice by way of analyses, speeches, interviews, and occasional texts that oftentimes reemerge later in books in a more elaborate and “scholarly” form. Resituating the engagements of the sociologist in their historical and intellectual contexts thus leads not only to displacing the boundary between scientific research and political action. It also reveals the work of controlled conversion of social pulsion into critical intellec­ tual impulsion that endows sociology with the epistemological vigi­ lance necessary to break with the preconstructed social and political problems of “current affairs.” (Translated by Loïc Wacquant and James Ingram)

Notes 1

Pierre Bourdieu, On Television and Journalism (London: Pluto, 1998 [1996]).

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2 These interventions are collected in Pierre Bourdieu, Interventions, 1961-2001. Science sociale et action politique, ed. Franck Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo (Montreal: Comeau & Nadeau, 2002) [Trans.: the original text and English translations have been cited where possible]. 3 Pierre Bourdieu, “Monopolisation politique et révolutions symbol­ iques” (1990), in Propos sur le champ politique (Lyon: Presses Univer­ sitaires de Lyon, 2000), pp. 99-108. 4 Pierre Bourdieu, “Penser la politique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 71/2 (March 1988): 2-3. 5 Pierre Bourdieu, “Les doxosophes,” Minuit 1 (November 1972): 26-45. 6 Ibid. 7 Pierre Bourdieu, “La science et l’actualité,” Actes de la recherche en sci­ ences sociales 61 (March 1986): 2-3. 8 Abdelmalek Sayad, interview published in MARS 6 (1996): 4-7. 9 Pierre Bourdieu, “Tout est social,” interview with P.-M. de Baisi, Mag­ azine littéraire 303 (October 1992): 104-11. 10 Pierre Bourdieu, “Entre amis,” Awal 21 (2000): 5-10; idem. The Alge­ rians (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962 [1958]). 11 Pierre Bourdieu, “Révolution dans la révolution,” Esprit 1 (January 1961): 27-40, and idem, “The Algerian Subproletariat,” in Men, State and Society in the Contemporary Maghrib, ed. Ira William Zartman (London: Praeger, 1973 [Les Temps modernes, 1962]), pp. 126-53. Along with these texts, Bourdieu published other articles in more aca­ demic journals, such as “Guerre et mutation sociale en Algérie,” Etudes méditerranéennes 7 (Spring 1960): 25-37, and “La hantise du chômage chez l’ouvrier algérien: prolétariat et système colonial,” Sociologie du travail 1 (December 1962): 313-31. 12 See Bourdieu, Travail et travailleurs en Algérie, with Alain Darbel, JeanPierre Rivet, and Claude Seibel (Paris & The Hague: Mouton, 1963) and idem, Le Déracinement. La crise de l’agriculture algérienne, with A. Sayad (Paris: Minuit, 1964). 13 Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, with Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, and Jean-Claude Chamboredon (Cambridge: Polity, 1990 [1965]); idem, The Love o f Art: European Art Museums and their Public, with Alain Darbel and Dominique Schnapper (Cambridge: Polity, 1990 [1966]); idem, ed., Le Partage des bénéfices, in collaboration with statisticians and economists from the INSEE (Paris: Minuit, 1966); and idem, The Craft o f Sociology: Epistemolo­ gical Preliminaries, with Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Jean-Claude Passeron (New York & Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991 [1968]). 14 Collective, “Manifeste pour des états généraux du mouvement social européen,” Le Monde, 1 May 2000. 15 See Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Edu­ cation, Society and Culture (London: Sage, 1977 [1970]).

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See Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Cambridge: Polity, 1988 [1984]). Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passeron, and Monique de Saint Martin, Academie Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power (Cambridge: Polity, 1992 [1965]); Pierre Bourdieu and JeanClaude Passeron, The Inheritors: French Students and their Relation to Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979 [1964]). Pierre Bourdieu, The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field o f Power, preface by L. Wacquant (Cambridge: Polity, 1996 [1989]), p. 5. Pierre Bourdieu, “Public Opinion Does Not Exist” (1971), in Sociology in Question (London: Sage, 1994 [1980]), pp. 149-57. These critiques are taken up again from various angles in Distinction: A Social Critique o f the Judgment o f Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer­ sity Press, 1984 [1979]), and Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Polity, 1991). See also Pierre Bourdieu, “L’opinion publique,” with Patrick Champagne, in 50 Idées qui ébranlèrent le monde, ed. Youri Afanassiev and Marc Ferro (Paris: Payot/Progress, 1989), pp. 204-6; interview with Pierre Viansson-Ponté, “Le droit à la parole” and “La culture pour qui et pourquoi?,” Le Monde, 11-12 ‘October 1977; and Patrick Champagne’s discussion of the irruption of polling in the French polit­ ical field, chapter 6 in this book. On these debates, see Alain Lancelot, Opinion publique (Paris: Sofres, 1982); Pierre Bourdieu, “Opinion Polls: A ‘Science’ without a Scien­ tist,” in In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Cam­ bridge: Polity, 1990 [1987]), pp. 168-74, and Science o f Science and Reflexivity (Cambridge: Polity, 2004 [2001]); also see Johan Heilbron, “Pionnier par défaut?” and Loïc Blondiaux, “Comment rompre avec Durkheim,” Revue française de sociologie 32, no. 3 (1991): 365-80 and 411-42. [Jean Stoetzel (1910-1987) was the founder of the Revue française de sociologie and of IFOP, the French Institute of Public Opinion, one of France’s leading polling firms - Trans.] Pierre Bourdieu, “Formes d’action politique et mode d’existence des groupes” (1973), in Propos sur le champ politique, pp. 81-8. Bourdieu, “Les doxosophes,” and idem, “Les intellectuels dans le champ de la lutte des classes,” La Nouvelle Critique 87 (1975): 20- 6 . See Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski, “La production de l’idéologie dominante,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 2/3 (1976): 4-73. Other articles were devoted to this transformation, esp. that of Michael Poliak, “La planification des sciences sociales,” pp. 105-21. “Déclaration d’intention,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 1 (January 1975): 2-3. Pierre Bourdieu, “Méthode scientifique et hiérarchie sociale des objets,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 1 (1975): 4.

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Pierre Bourdieu, “La représentation politique. Éléments pour une théorie du champ politique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 36/7 (1981): 3-24 (repr. in English translation in Language and Sym­ bolic Power, 1991). See Pierre Bourdieu, “Retrouver la tradition libertaire de la gauche,” Libération, 23 December 1981, pp. 8-9; “Les intellectuels et les pouvoirs. Retour sur notre soutien à Solidarnosc,” idem, in Michel Foucault, une histoire de la vérité (Paris: Syros, 1985), pp. 93-4. Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Cambridge: Polity, 1988 [1984]); see also the interview “Université: les rois sont nus,” Le Nouvel Obser­ vateur, 2-8 November 1984, pp. 86-90. “Le rapport du Collège de France: Pierre Bourdieu s’explique,” La Quinzaine littéraire 445 (August 1985): 8-10. Since the 1970s, Rocard had incarnated a moderate, “realist” socialism inspired by Pierre Mendès-France, but soon enough became the fount for the neoliberal current at the heart of the French Left. Twice prevented from running as a candidate for the presidency by Mitterrand in 1981 and 1987, Rocard finally used his political weight to be nominated prime minister in the Socialists’ second seven-year presidential term. Pierre Bourdieu, “À quand un lycée Bernard Tapie?,” Libératioti, 4 December 1986. [Bernard Tapie was a flashy “self-made” millionaire, specializing in corporate takeovers and owner of the ultra-popular soccer club of Marseilles, who had risen in the media to the point where Mitterrand nominated him Minister for Urban Affairs; he was later sen­ tenced to prison for various financial crimes - Trans.] Bourdieu, The State Nobility, p. 389. Pierre Bourdieu et al., The Weight o f the World: Social Suffering in Con­ temporary Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1999 [1993]), a collective work with Alain Accardo, Gabrielle Balazs, Stéphane Beaud, François Bonvin, Emmanuel Bourdieu, Philippe Bourgois, Sylvain Broccolichi, Patrick Champagne, Rosine Christin, Jean-Pierre Faguer, Sandrine Garcia, Remi Lenoir, Frédérique Matonti, Francine Muel-Dreyfus, Michel Pialoux, Louis Pinto, Denis Podalydès, Abdelmayek Sayad, Charles Soulié, Bernard Urlacher, Loïc Wacquant, and Anne-Marie Waser. Pierre Bourdieu, “A Paradoxical Foundation of Ethics,” in Practical Reasons: On the Theory o f Action (Cambridge: Polity, 1998 [1994]), p. 144 (trans. modified). Ibid., p. 145 (trans. modified). Pierre Bourdieu, “Notre État de misère,” L’Express, 18 March 1993, pp. 112-15. Liber 1 (October 1989): 2. “Liber continue,” Liber 7 (September 1991): 1. “Une union sans valeurs,” interview with Jurgen Habermas, Liber 10 (June 1992): 16-17; Pierre Bourdieu, “Les murs mentaux,” Liber 13 (January 1993): 2-4.

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Pierre Bourdieu, “Et p ourtant. . . Liber 25 (December 1995): 1-2. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Corporatism of the Universal,” Telos 81 (Fall 1989): 99-100, and in The Rules o f Art: Structure and Genesis o f the Artistic Field (Cambridge: Polity, 1996 [1992]), pp. 339-48. 43 Pierre Bourdieu, “Un parlement des écrivains, pour quoi faire?,” Libération, 3 November 1994. 44 Pierre Bourdieu, “L’intellectuel dans la cité,” interview with Florence Dutheil, Le Monde, 5 November 1993. 45 ARESER, Quelques diagnostics et remèdes urgents pour une université en péril (Paris: Raisons d’agir Editions, 1997); see also Bourdieu, Inter­ ventions, pp. 296 and 301. 46 Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Leca, “Avec les intellectuels algériens,” Le Monde, 7 October 1994. For Bourdieu, the living incarnation of the “negative intellectual” propped up and motivated by media fame on this and other questions is writer Bernard Henry-Lévy (cf. Pierre Bourdieu, Acts o f Resistance: Against the Tyranny o f the Market (London: Pluto Press, 2000 [1998]), pp. 91-4). 47 CISIA Charter, Paris, 1 July 1993. 48 Bourdieu, “Non-assistance à personne en danger,” with Jacques Derrida and Sami Naïr, Le Monde, 29 Decembef‘1994; idem, “M. Pasqua, son conseiller et les étrangers,” with Jacques Derrida, Le Monde, 10 June 1995, p. 20; idem, “Non à la ghettoïsation de l’Algérie,” with Jean Leca, Le Monde, 25 March 1995. 49 See René Mouriaux and Sophie Béroud, eds.. Le Souffle de décembre (Paris: Syllepse, 1997). 50 The Fondation Saint-Simon was launched in December 1982 at the ini­ tiative of François Furet, Pierre Rosanvallon, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Simon and Pierre Nora, Alain Mine, and Roger Fauroux. Bringing together academe, the business world, and top-level civil service, it “accomplished the ideological work necessary to conceal political work, [in order to] build the ‘narrow way’ followed by politi­ cal leaders [toward] market democracy as ‘the end of history’ and social liberalism as the unsurpassable horizon of our societies.” See Vincent Laurent, “Enquête sur la fondation Saint-Simon. Les architectes du social-libéralisme,” Le Monde diplomatique, September 1998; Serge Halimi, “Les boîtes à idées de la droite américaine,” Le Monde diplo­ matique, May 1995. 51 See Julien Duval, Christophe Gaubert, Frédéric Lebaron, Dominique Marchetti, and Fabienne Pavis, Le Décembre des intellectuels français (Paris: Raisons d’agir Editions, 1998). 52 Intervention published as “Against the Destruction of a Civilization,” in Acts o f Resistance: Against the Tyranny o f the Market, p. 25. 53 Le Journal du dimanche, 10 December 1995, for Ricoeur’s position, and Thomas Gay, “Alain Touraine, un intellectuel ‘médiatique’ en décembre 1995,” Mouvetnents (September 1997): 29-31.

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See Bourdieu, “Some Questions about the Gay and Lesbian Question,” in Masculine Domination (Cambridge: Polity, 2001 (1998]) (trans. modified). Pierre Bourdieu, “The Protest Movement of the Unemployed, a Social Miracle,” in Acts o f Resistance, pp. 88-90. Pierre Bourdieu, “Job Insecurity is Everywhere Now,” in Acts o f Resis­ tance, pp. 81-7; see also the two issues of Actes de la recherche en sci­ ences sociales devoted to “New Forms of Labor Domination,” 114 and 115 (September and December 1996). Pierre Bourdieu, “Libé 20 ans après,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 101/2 (March 1994): 39. On Television brought together two courses at the Collège de France filmed in March 1996 for the cable channel Paris Première and one article, “L’emprise du journalisme,” which first appeared in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 101/2 (March 1994): 3-9, in an issue devoted to the theme of “The Stranglehold of Journalism.” ACRIMFD, “Manifeste pour la défense de France Culture,” L'Humanité, 5 November 1999. A group for reflection, ACRIMED was launched by sociologist Patrick Champagne and lawyer Henri Maler; see . This interview was prolonged by fullfledged empirical studies gathered in an issue of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales on “Journalism and the Economy” (131/2, March 2000 ) .

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Pierre Bourdieu, interview with Lino Polegato, 14 December 2001, Flux News (Liège, Belgium) 27 (December 2001): 7. Pierre Bourdieu, “Questions aux vrais maîtres du monde,” Libération and L’Humanité, 13 October 1998; Le Monde, 14 October 1999 [trans. as “Address to the True Masters of the World,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 46 (2002): 170-6]. Pierre Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy (Cambridge: Polity, 2004 |2000]). Pierre Bourdieu, “Célibat et condition paysanne,” Etudes rurales 5/6 (1962); reprinted in Le Bal des célibataires (Paris: Seuil/Point, 2002), pp. 15-165; idem, “Making the Economie Habitus: Algerian Workers Revisited,” Ethnography 1, no. 1 (July 2000): 17-41. Interview in Flux News 27 (December 2001): 24. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” Theory, Culture and Society 16, no. 1 (1999 [1998]): 41 ff, chapter 9 in this volume, and idem, “Neoliberal Newspeak,” Radical Philosophy 105 (January 2001): 2-5. Pierre Bourdieu, “Pour un mouvement social européen,” Le Monde diplomatique, June 1999; repr. in Firing Back: For a European Social Movement (London: Verso, 2003 [2001]), p. 14. See Pierre Bourdieu, “Les objectifs d’un mouvement social européen,” available, with many other occasional texts from this period, at

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[published as “Against the Policy of Depoliticiza­ tion,” Studies in Political Econom y 69 (Autumn 2002): 31-41; also in Firing Back, pp. 38-52 - Trans]. This call was notably launched in 1998 by SUD unionists and activists of the associations that had organized European marches against unem­ ployment and insecurity; many of its initiators were also among the first signatories of the Estates General of the European Social Movement. See esp. Bertrand Schmitt and Patrice Spadoni, Les Sentiers de la colère, 15472 kilomètres à pieds contre le chômage (Paris: L’Esprit frappeur, 2000), preface by Bourdieu, “Misère du monde et mouvements sociaux,” pp. 15-21. Pierre Bourdieu, “Les chercheurs et le mouvement social” (2001), repr. in Interventions, pp. 465-9.

5 A ncien R égim e Ballots:

A Double Historicization of Electoral Practices Olivier Christin

In the middle of the 1740s, two adversaries squared off in the heart of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris to represent the Nation of France in the election of rector: Poirier, former procurer of the Nation, and Hamelin, professor of philosophy at the Collège de Mazarin. A factum published in 1744 to support the claims of the former emphasized that “he has been registered at the University for 34 years,” “has been rector,” and “has grown gray in the work and responsibilities of his profession,” while his competitor “has only been on the rolls four years” and has worked only “six months.” 1 For the factum’s author, the honor of representing the Nation of France thus “naturally” fell to Poirier in the name of “propriety” and the privileges of his post of procurer. His partisans then replied at length to Hamelin, who had invoked “the idea of the right of election, the essence and character of which are never having to be regulated except by the liberty and plurality of the votes.” For them, in this election the liberty of the voters consists solely in considering whether the subject who runs for office has the qualities required to be elected and in rejecting he who lacks them. It is likewise in almost all companies and communities whose members are named by turn to the highest positions, the rank of seniority determines the election unless there are reasons to exclude the aspirant.

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Tow ard a H is to ry o f C o lle c tiv e D e c is io n -M a k in g

It is, needless to say, not a matter of chance if, beyond the events peculiar to the world of the university and its fierce battles over apparently minimal stakes, a head-on clash between two conceptions of voting or elections can be observed in this conflict in the middle of the eighteenth century. Whereas Hamelin espouses a definition of suffrage that seems to conform to contemporary definitions - the free exercise of choice by the majority of electors, whose equivalent votes can be distinguished and counted - Poirier and his partisans remain faithful to a conception dominant in ancien régime France, which saw in the collective decision a particularly effective and legitimate means of social reproduction and the perpetuation of elites,2 of which the world of the university would not provide the only examples.3 Poirier, in this sense, was appointed by his institution even before its members had expressed any explicit choice: he is its “natural” representative, a fact which plainly manifests itself to his peers. Indeed, the factum says this frankly: “Mr. Poirier, who is nominated less to obtain a per­ sonal honor than to preserve the privileges of his position, believes he is obligated to uphold his rights.” The term “election” could thus be a synonym for appointment or co-optation without anyone seeing the least contradiction. If the ancien régime state to all appearances succeeded in consid­ erably restraining the recourse to decision by election in the political realm (no convocation of the Estates General after 1614, “curtail­ ment of the liberties of the towns,” transformation of the sacred cer­ emony of coronation so as to erase any reminder of the hypothetical consent of the people or the nobility, etc.), it simultaneously con­ firmed the status of social actors and put in their hands legitimate and effective instruments that allowed them to ensure the perpetua­ tion of their position: guild masters appointed from their own ranks the syndics which decreed their group’s rules of operation, and espe­ cially the conditions for becoming a master; urban notables contin­ ued to share local responsibilities without inopportune competition, and so on. The monarchy thus in part engaged the self-interested col­ laboration of precisely those whom it had dispossessed of their ancient (and fragile) political prerogatives. Yet, little by little in the course of the eighteenth century, this organic, corporatist conception o f voting as the expression of corporate interests found itself in com­ petition with another representation of the collective will, which made it the product, by way of an “invisible hand,” of the statistical aggregation o f opinions that are in principle individual and perfectly

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equivalent, since they are without relation to the status of those who formulate them.4 The considerable theoretical effort that this trans­ formation of the definition of voting required is witnessed notably by the analyses of Jean-Charles Borda and Condorcet on the mathe­ matical paradoxes of the majority decision and the individual vote, which are conceivable only once one has accepted the absolute equal­ ity of electors and the perfectly interchangeable character of their votes, but also in the perceptible evolution of certain legal manuals, which during this period began to distinguish more carefully between co-optation, individual choice, and collective decision; or again in the debates that accompanied the American Revolution concerning bicameralism and the just representation of both the states and the people. The example of the American colonies, exactly contemporaneous with the French debates, shows, however, that political support for individual voting should perhaps not be connected too strongly to the establishment of the mathematical and statistical knowledge that would, incorrectly, seem to be its intellectual condition of possibility. Even if the delegates to the 1774 Continental Congress deplored the absence of “any suitable material for evaluating the importance of each colony,” the principle of the proportional representation of the states gradually imposed itself in an empirical manner, at the expense of ancient forms of delegation and sharing of responsibilities. Within the 13 states, critiques also proliferated of the collegial and almost egalitarian representation of counties and towns in local assemblies, which ignored differences of population and wealth. An April 1776 report from the county of Essex called for “equality of repre­ sentation, that this be based on number, wealth, or both” in the Massachusetts General Court. Here, as at the federal level, the triumph of individual voting and the arithmetic principle, which undermined ancient collegial representation, thus owed more to the canny pragmatism of the actors and the conjunction of the interests of the dominant - the richer towns or states also being the more pop­ ulous - than to a precise ideological program: when a new session of the General Court opened a few months later, the number of dele­ gates was increased from 201 to 266, this increase in effect benefit­ ing only the rich towns of the coast; Boston alone went from 4 delegates - the maximum allowed until then - to 12.5 Individual voting and the majority principle carried the day first of all because they agreed with the interests of economic liberalism. Rather than succeeding one another in a simple chronological order that would see its turning point between 1770 and 1848, individual-majoritarian voting and organic-collegial voting over-

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lapped. They were thus in lasting competition, a function in part of the structure of the political field and of the strategies employed by social actors who could work here to produce a decision that was necessarily unanimous or could be presented as such - for example, in the election of sovereign pontiffs - by seeking to convert resources and revenues acquired outside any public office into political capital, and finally recognizing in atomized voting the basis for a new defi­ nition of the collective will that favored an unprecedented autonomization of the political. We can understand from this the interest in closely connecting sociological work with historical analysis with regard to voting. It is in effect a matter of being attentive to two apparently opposite but nevertheless deeply interdependent errors: the reductionist assimila­ tion o f voting to democratic political suffrage, which runs the risk of forgetting that electoral practices have served and still serve many other purposes than the free and equitable selection of political rep­ resentatives; and the belief in the transhistorical invariability o f illu­ sory social technologies that could be found unchanging in Greece, Rome, or the contemporary world, this time at the risk of failing to see that the nominal identity of concepts and techniques conceals a profound transformation of the stakes and relations of power, and therefore of the social uses of elections. Perhaps it is not entirely without interest, for instance, to recall that the term “parity” did not make its appearance in law and political science at the end of the 1990s, with the French debates over increasing the political repre­ sentation of women - as is suggested, implicitly but with the force of self-evidence, by the brief notice devoted to it by a recent dictionary of voting6 - but in the sixteenth century, in the context of the wars of religion, when German Protestants sought to neutralize the dramatic effects for them of the overrepresentation of Catholics in the central government bodies, especially the Diet.7 Far from erudite coquetry or antiquarian distraction, this reminder in effect makes it possible to understand that parity was, at its origin, an instrument of political equity, but also a powerful construction against majoritarian decision-making and the idea of fellow-citizenship that underlay it.8 It is in any case only through such a “rehistoricization” of appar­ ently timeless institutions like voting that one can hope to leave behind what is often nothing but a science of procedures in order to take up the social analysis of the modes of construction of decisions. Some scattered, seldom brought together, and sometimes com­ pletely unknown articles by Pierre Bourdieu offer the surest method­ ological incitement and practical instruction for proceeding with this work of historicization or, more exactly, of double historicization of

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the categories of the subject under investigation but also of its sources,9 so sorely missing in the aforementioned Dictionnaire du vote. Indeed, Bourdieu specifies on many occasions in his analysis the necessity of “handling historical concepts with historical tweezers,” which is to say submitting the instruments with which historians think history to historical critique, partly in the manner of Begriffsgescbicbte. He sees this historical reflexivity as one of the indispen­ sable conditions for freeing ourselves from essentialism and from the tendency to constitute as ahistorical categories concepts that are in fact historically formed and transformed by actors. By adopting this methodological posture in an inquiry into the history of collective decision-making, one sees from the outset that far from designating, under the apparent and illusory identity of nominal forms, similar conditions and practices in different contexts, the terms “majority,” “suffrage,” or “vote” instead refer, according to their places and times, to very heterogeneous realities and particular struggles in which precisely they are at stake. The example given at the beginning of this chapter thus shows that the object of the symbolic struggle between the two professors was not just the conquest of an honorific office of very modest importance but the definition of a legitimate election at the heart of the university, and consequently the nature of the highly particular collective person that the latter constituted. By inviting us to etymological caution and the historical critique of the categories of historical understanding as well as of indigenous cate­ gories, which are never innocent, Bourdieu traces the lineaments of a veritable program for the social history of electoral practices. But this program would have remained very vague had it not been reinforced by other reflections more specifically devoted to the prob­ lems of collective decision-making, representation, and delegation. Bourdieu thus returns in two short texts of 2000 and 2001 to a page of the Leçons de sociologie in which Emile Durkheim distinguishes the collective decision produced by the occasional coming together of isolated individuals “who do not know one another, who have not contributed to forming one another’s opinions,” from that which results from the specific work of a “constituted, coherent, permanent group.”10 The first model, which one can see is close to liberal theo­ ries of economic decision-making and statistical approaches that define collective opinion as the aggregate of individual opinions, is thus historically opposed to a collective form of producing and expressing a collective decision based on “delegation to specially designed institutions” - unions, associations, parties. Of course, this distinction assumes its full sense only in contemporary democratic societies, where canonical forms of individual suffrage, statistical

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techniques for constructing opinion, and collective organizations that speak for the individual interests of each of their members all meet in public space. But precisely therein lies the interest that pushes the historian to wonder about what makes for the singularity of the polit­ ical situations of the ancien régime, in which one sees plenty of votes and electoral consultations, more or less large, more or less regular, more or less important, but nothing of the two logics identified by Durkheim and Bourdieu. This therefore points to the work of historicization mentioned above. The distinction established in the Leçons de sociologie and further developed by Bourdieu offers a second advantage, which is even more decisive for historical inquiry, by forcing the researcher not to confuse the mode of production of opinion and its mode of expression: to study only the formal proce­ dures of voting, the ways of casting one’s vote, of counting votes, of nominating candidates, is in effect to perceive only a part of the social processes in play in opinion-formation and decision-making. Historicizing and sociologizing the instruments of historical and sociological study, as against the opposed illusions of the ahistorical eternality of practices and ideals and the'radical novelty of contem­ porary types of voting: this methodological requirement consequently leads to looking, contra the dominant historiographical tradition that is obsessed with the nation-state and its specific modes of construct­ ing public opinion, into the lively and numerous electoral practices of ancien régime societies, but also to searching out and emphasiz­ ing everything that separates them from the logics of producing deci­ sions brought to light by Durkheim. How could one fail to notice that the orders, bodies, companies, and assemblies of the ancien régime voted, and that these votes assumed considerable importance for historical actors? And how could one fail to notice that these votes mobilized only extremely restricted electoral colleges - often a few people, rarely hundreds - and that the threshold effects and conse­ quences of constituting a body (effets de corps) were therefore of a completely different nature than those to which Bourdieu refers?11

Social R eproduction and th e Transm ission o f Powers

It is in the religious domain that the particular importance of elec­ toral processes in the transmission of responsibilities can best be observed, since there the law completely excluded selection by lot or heredity.12 In France after 1516 the electoral regime for major

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benefices (bishoprics, abbeys) by the canons and religious orders was theoretically replaced by royal appointment. But these new arrange­ ments quickly came in for adjustments: as of 1579 Henri III restored elections for some abbeys at the head of orders, like Cluny, Cîteaux, or Grandmont, which then rediscovered the possibility of enjoying this prestigious and valuable privilege. Very rapidly, however, the tension between this exorbitant but fragile liberty and a royal Gallican policy that led the sovereign to intervene in the internal affairs of the Church gave rise to disputes and challenges, dragging the orders into extremely complex quarrels of which Cîteaux offers a good example. The order was shaken by the rivalry between two religious sensi­ bilities that were unequally represented within it: on one side, Strict Observance, the minority, wanted to restore the rule and reform the order in the direction sought by the Council of Trent; on the other, Common Observance, or the Conventuals, brought together those determined to perpetuate a mode of operation to which they had vowed obedience ever since they had chosen a life of devotion. These two currents each tried to exploit the resources which the constitu­ tions of the order put at their disposal against the other, especially the possibility of naming abbots by election. In 1624 the Holy Father Dorn Nicolas Boucher passed away. Three candidates aspired to succeed him and to this end led active cam­ paigns sullied by threats, cabals, and corruption. The first election was therefore annulled. Finally Pierre Nivelle was elected, but at the end of a long and chaotic process in which the secular authorities had to intervene. Ten years later, in 1635, the Cardinal of Richelieu was in turn elected as the head of the order. To facilitate his election, Nivelle resigned and took a bishopric. The carefully prepared elec­ tion was held with the unanimity of those present. In 1642, the car­ dinal’s death initiated a new crisis: Claude Vaussin was elected abbot, but without the procedure being respected. His election was there­ fore overturned by an order of council in January 1643. The order then sank into a morass of procedural quarrels and multiple, con­ tradictory external interventions, each camp seeking support outside the community. In May 1645 this resulted in the election of two rival abbots. It was only in 1651 that the general chapter of Cîteaux finally convened after an interruption of 23 years. But far from bringing the hoped-for relief and return to the normal operation of the order, this led to a fundamental procedural quarrel that dragged the commu­ nity’s flaws into broad daylight.13 In 1651 the order decided to adopt the principle of voting by “fil­ iation” rather than by head. Behind this decision, which was appar-

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ently of secondary importance, in fact hung not only the fates of the different conflicting factions but also the very way the community represented the order and its operation. Voting by head had the merits of clarity and antiquity. As a work from 1683 said, “it is nothing but giving each his vote, as is done in all ecclesiastical or secular com­ panies. .. . We listen to everyone individually and after all have had their say, we collect the votes and decide by a plurality.” The alter­ native, voting by filiation, was much more complex and embraced more strictly the structures and institutional organization of the order. The filiations, five in number, effectively brought together the monasteries that came from the same house. If the idea was to vote by filiation, it was then necessary to divide the electoral bodies of Définiteurs (those who sit on the Définitoire) into five subsections, five offices. As the Définiteurs numbered 25, there would thus be five subsections of five members, each including the head abbot and four other members. The election would then take place in two rounds: the first going to the majority of votes in each subsection, the second to the majority of votes among the subsections. Imposing voting by filiation was doubly advantageous to the Conventuals, who were securely installed in the institutionally determining positions: first of all, it gave a decisive weight to the institution and the power-holders at its heart, since it is hard to imagine that in limited subsections those chosen by the head abbots could really oppose them; above all, it placed in the hands of these head abbots instruments for controlling decision-making and means for avoiding sudden majoritarian effects contrary to their interests. It sufficed to be nine and well organized to control the whole electoral college of 25 Définiteurs. As foreseen, organizing the vote by filiation was detrimental to the Observants. A work that appeared in 1656 in favor of the latter noted bitterly: The Observance abbots are given nice words and even hope of a com­ promise in order to get them to join the chapter and to preempt the opposition and protests they could make against it, and six are even made Définiteurs; but they are so dispersed by the five filiations that within each of them, which is made up of five abbots, there was only one from Observance (with the exception of Pontigny, where they had two); so that having only six votes out of 25, they had no way to prevent by their votes the harm that was to be done to them.

The example of Citeaux - though the analysis would also hold for other orders and institutions - thus shows extremely clearly what certain elections in ancien régime society could represent: a means,

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at once effective and difficult, of social reproduction and the trans­ mission of functions, where, for one reason or another, heredity, venality, lottery, or authoritarian nomination were excluded. Dictio­ naries of canon and civil law, treatises on jurisprudence, encyclope­ dias, and other legal compendia carry further evidence of this. Here the term “election” designates a free collective choice just as much as a more or less direct form of appointment or co-optation.14 For the canonist Durand de Maillane, for example, “election is the choice, made canonically by a body, community, or chapter, of an able person to fill some dignity, office, or benefice.”15 At Qteaux, as in many other bodies, the pettifogging legalism of the electoral process allowed the transmission of offices to be con­ ferred with all the characteristics of extremely strict co-optation and strictly organized the conditions of the order’s institutional repro­ duction: the abbot of Cîteaux in effect freely named, after consulta­ tion with other head abbots, those who would sit in the Definitorium, the 25-member college exercising the real power in the general chapter and entrusted with naming the order’s general abbot. This type of controlled transmission of authority and organized co­ optation can be found in many institutions of the early modern period, where, owing to the extreme narrowness of the electoral college (rarely more than a few dozen people) and the dizzying com­ plexity of the procedures, the effective power-holders managed to exercise de facto a determining influence on their own succession. In certain trades, like bakers, the ruling hierarchy of acting and past juror-syndics or trustees controlled the nomination of new ones; other masters sat in rotation and always in a position of weakness.16 Still more clearly, a number of municipal institutions organized the elec­ tion of magistrates according to procedures that in effect amounted to a mode of co-optation, in which the deputies or consuls partly chose their successors. Notably in Millau, this system, recalling the conclave in which the cardinals created by the Pope are charged with naming his successor, functioned as follows: “The consuls name polit­ ical counselors; the political counselors elect the general council and the consuls.”17 It would be tempting to conclude from this, with part of the historiography, that the practice of voting in ancien régime society merely barely concealed the erosion of ancient representative institu­ tions and past autonomies and the advance of more rigid forms of social reproduction for the benefit of closed oligarchies. The history of institutions as the exposure of the great stability of men and groups at the head of cities, trades, and assemblies seems to provide con­ clusive evidence here. This, however, would be too hasty and would

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prevent us from understanding the intensity of the conflicts and squabbles that dot the electoral processes which we are told were only a façade. It would ignore the considerable number of texts that denounce “cabals,” “plots,” and “intrigues,” thereby revealing the bitterness of the rivalries between contenders for office. It would, above all, prevent us from understanding why these Institutions towns, trades, religious organizations - protested so vehemently when the monarchy tried to transform elected positions into appointed or venal offices. If the same families or the same people perpetuated themselves at the head of trades or towns, why would they not wish to accommodate themselves to their patrimonialization and so attain their durable enjoyment without risk? Why did they agree to go into debt, sometimes deeply, to repurchase these offices and restore their elective character? Here the case of Millau again proves to be striking: when, at the end of the seventeenth century, the town consented to considerable efforts to repurchase offices, the general council deemed that “one could not buy too dear a good so precious, one which is important above all else to preserve ancient public frèedoms.”18 Even in a system as closed as that of Millau, the elective character of certain public offices was thus considered essential for the functioning of the town and above all for the image power-holders sought to give it. In the same years, Dieppe too repurchased the municipal offices created by the king, notably the office of mayor, whose “financing . . . was fixed at 12 livres by order of council on 20 June 1693, whereby the King joined this office to the Body of the Town, to be exercised by a citizen chosen by the community, without wages or provisions, with the honors and prerogatives attached to it.” 19 Provisionally, we could thus suggest that the transmission of offices by vote played not only an essential role in regulating the relations of forces between domi­ nant groups (by permitting, for example, a rotation of families or persons at the head of institutions), but above all was part of an offi­ cial discourse of urban elites about the city and themselves.20 In this sense, far from being a ruse which the historian is obliged to dispel, it represented one of the stakes by means of which social actors effectively defined themselves.

S peaking w ith O n e V oice

Voting imposes itself in most institutional discourses as one of the means for resolving conflicts, or more precisely as the one path that

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leads from a plurality of positions and opinions to a collective deci­ sion to which each must agree to rally, even if authors make various distinctions and precautions on this point.21 Historians and legal scholars have described the advance of majoritarian decision-making through the course of the Middle Ages in almost all domains - reli­ gious (the election of sovereign popes, abbots, and bishops) as well as secular (the election of town councils and of kings in the Germanic countries). They agree especially on the existence of a turning point around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, on the one hand, toward the stabilization of electoral colleges (for popes, prelates, and kings) to the detriment of hazily defined ancient popular assemblies, and, on the other, toward the progressive substitution of the idea of cor­ poration by that of association in the representation of society with the emergence of the concept of universitas.22 This double transfor­ mation thus made it possible to renounce the necessity of unanimitas, which had dominated all reflections on voting until then, and to accept, under certain conditions, the juridical fiction according to which the decision of the majority had to be regarded as that of the community as a whole (e.g., in Scaevola). Renouncing the concrete pursuit of unanimity on everything by making a majority decision that of the whole community amounted not to prohibiting dissension and differences of opinion, but, on the contrary, to inventing ways of realizing what Bodin would call “dis­ cordant accord.” By accepting majority voting as the principle of legitimate collective decision-making, experts in canon and civil law in effect allowed minority opinions to be expressed, but at the same time insisted on the submission of the minority to the majority, the latter’s choice becoming the choice of all. If the scope of the validity of majority decision-making was a matter of debate, its principle was no less regularly invoked as a way of bringing opinions together and, despite differences, expressing the general will of a particular group or body. In 1579, for example, the clergy of France was concerned about the confusion that seemed to prevail in the perception of the décimes, taxes deducted from benefices for the profit of the crown. Some ecclesiastical provinces continued to pay, while others ceased doing so. “To do this,” the prelates, by general agreement, have found it advisable to call up the general syndics of the Clergy of France, seated in Paris, in order to present a request all together in the name o f the Clergy o f France to his Majesty to obtain permission to convoke a general assembly of the whole of the ecclesiastical estate to bring together as much as is possible this diversity o f opinion and obviate the confusions that loom ahead.23

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Only the general assembly could thus produce a collective decision that would commit the clergy as a whole; it alone would be justified in speaking in its name. Only it could finally constitute a body and speak with one voice from the legitimate diversity of voices expressed within it. Here resides the force of majority decision-making: from a plurality of opinions it forges a collective position. It should not be surprising, then, that the first sessions of the general assembly were devoted to the rigorous examination of authorizations and mandates and to finalizing the regulations that would organize the deputies’ work, since it was precisely a question of determining the participants and necessary conditions for consti­ tuting a legitimate “assembled body.”24 The deputies deliberated at length about the manner of expressing an opinion (by province, by majority vote, personally except in the most important matters) and about setting down minority opinions in the register. They finally decided that the registers would not take note of particular opinions - except when there was a request to the contrary - “but only reso­ lutions made by a plurality of the votes.”25 They also undertook not to reveal “directly or indirectly the deliberations and resolutions made within the company except when it is permitted by them.” In general, “particular opinions will not be revealed, which is to say directly or indirectly, for whatever reason or consideration nor to any person whoever he may be.”26 Secrecy concerning deliberations and particular opinions thus appears as the indispensable condition for the institution’s ability to speak with a single voice and to constitute a body in the face of the financial demands of the monarchy. Here voting fulfilled the double function of resolving internal conflicts and maintaining external cohe­ sion. Notably, it allowed for the regulation of conflicts and quarrels over precedence, which the society of orders engendered without respite and would otherwise have been insoluble. In the general assembly of Melun, for example, two candidates applied for the rank of president: Pierre Despinac, archbishop of Lyon, who judged that this honor was due to him “by reason of his primatial dignity,” and Antoine Prévôt, archbishop of Bordeaux, who demanded the job because “by the stipulation of the law, the most senior in promotion and dignity must preside.” Eager to escape this dilemma, the assem­ bly decided to deliberate and in the end named two presidents, idque jure concessionis. Far from contradicting the principles that organized and legiti­ mated ancien régime society, the practice of corporative voting was one of its essential springs. It effectively combined the autonomy of institutions with the necessary submission of individuals to corporate

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interests. In this, it participated fully in a specific social construction of the social world in which individual actors and social groups devoted themselves to constituting colleges or institutionalized bodies.

Distinction and Secession With the status accorded to them in 1484, Parisian apothecaries and spice merchants found themselves united in one of the six bodies that had occupied the summit of the hierarchy of trades in Paris since the beginning of the fifteenth century. This union no doubt arose in part from the prevalent representation of “spices,” which were considered as much scientific curiosities and medical products as foods and pleas­ ures of the table. In the fourteenth century, Magninus of Milan affirmed, for example, that “sauces have a medicinal nature”; in 1607, the Tbrésor de santé judged that “pepper maintains health, comforts the stomach, and dissipates winds. It aids urination, heals the tremors of intermittent fevers, and also heals snakebites.”27 Very soon, however, this body was riven with conflicts between the apothecaries and the spice merchants, the former continually seeking an actual split - to such an extent that the status of the trade was adjusted, notably in 1514, 1610, and 1 6 3 8 . In 1514 the king approved new statutes making it clear that “he who is a spice mer­ chant is not an apothecary, and he who is an apothecary is not a spice merchant.” The apothecaries thus remained members of the spice merchant-apothecary regulatory community, but with a special status authorizing them to elect their own jurors to the head of the trade without the participation of the spice merchants, who outnumbered them. This type of solution - unity of the community, division of responsibility for jurors - was later applied to the spice merchantsapothecaries of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, since it was said in the statutes of 1567, and confirmed in 1610, that “there shall be two jurors, one an apothecary and the other a spice merchant.” In 1638 this led to an association of two triumvirates: three spice merchants and three apothecaries, regardless of the extremely uneven demo­ graphic weight of the two groups. The disagreements between these involuntary partners at first sight took on the rather harmless appearance of recurring discussions about the legitimate limits of majoritarian decision-making:29 could one group, the spice merchants, by its demographic weight deprive another of any representation? Could it assimilate the other into its

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internal affairs and, for example, legislate in matters of recruitment or manufacturing processes? But these discussions in fact referred to important conflicts over precedence in the world of Parisian trades. Symbolic quarrels and rivalries proliferated and grew between the apothecaries and the spice merchants, the former seeking to escape the hold of the latter by invoking their specific expertise against those whose activity, in their eyes, was nothing but a matter of commerce. In hope of effecting an institutional separation, this strategy of dis­ tinction rested on accentuating the differences between the two pro­ fessional activities - which the apothecaries wanted to show no longer had anything in common by insisting on the learned and tech­ nical character of their work, putting to the fore their necessary col­ laboration with the faculty of medicine, and emphasizing the complexity and usefulness of their preparations - and on the' sys­ tematic disqualification of their adversaries, of which a text by Sébastien Mercier indicates the tone: the spice merchant-druggists sell poisons as they sell cinnamon, aqua fortis, and oil, cheese and emetic, aqua vita and dyes, sugar and arsenic, preserves and senna; their accredited status places them in competition with apothecaries. When they confuse drugs with salts that resemble them, too bad for the art of medicine, too bad above all for he who swallows the packet.30

Constrained, apart from very brief periods, to remain in the same body as the spice merchants, the apothecaries tried to create the con­ ditions for an effective separation of the two activities by multiply­ ing measures of distinction within the guild and searching for new tokens of recognition outside it - at the risk of coming into conflict with doctors, whose support was nonetheless indispensable: the length of apprenticeships, for example, which was fixed at three years for spice merchants, was raised to four for apothecaries; the condi­ tions for becoming a master were also made perceptibly stricter. Above all, in 1724 the apothecaries were implicitly granted the right to visit patients in the absence of a doctor.31 Finally, in 1777 the apothecaries won their case and were allowed to organize a college of pharmacy, “in order to prevent the danger that can result from the circulation of chemical, galenical, and pharmaceutical compounds entrusted to merchants who have until now been authorized to trade in them without being obliged to know their properties.”32 For the apothecaries, institutional recognition thus came through a very long critique of majoritarian decision-making on behalf of the specificity of their activity and expertise. Unable to win their sépara-

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tion straightaway, they had to demand and adopt complex arrange­ ments that provided them with a minimum of self-determination within the body before being able to constitute a body or autonomous company for themselves. The solutions varied: separate electoral col­ leges in 1514; a single college in 1610 but with two distinct jurors (one per trade); a drastic reduction of the electoral college in 1638, still with a net numerical superiority of spice merchants but with an egalitarian distribution of posts (three spice-merchant jurors, three apothecaries). These systems of parity thus had the advantage of not calling into question the single college of the trade, but at the same time of sealing the partial recognition of two distinct groups whose respective interests were thereby protected. The same mechanism could also be found in many villages in the kingdom of France immediately after the Edict of Nantes (1598), which established a peaceful and regulated mode of coexistence between Protestants and Catholics: wherever the two confessions lived together and shared local power, customary electoral procedures for the nomination of urban magistrates were partially altered by the establishment of a very precise distribution of offices (twothirds-one-third or half-and-half, for example). In theory, majority voting continued to be in effect, but on the condition that in any case it resulted in the allocation of offices between the confessions that had been arbitrarily settled in advance: some candidates were there­ fore oddly elected first consul after having won fewer votes than the second consul.33 The point of this mechanism was of course to main­ tain the official unity of the community by all the while assuring the rival bodies that composed it of institutional representation and pro­ tection from the sudden effects of the majority: the kingdom certainly did not turn its back on the rule of majoritarianism, but it channeled some of the foreseeable excesses of the period immediately after a civil war. All the inhabitants of the affected villages - or at least those entitled to do so - continued to vote together, and their votes could be added together, since they were no different, but the majority could not reduce the minority to silence and institutional death.

Conclusion: Constituting a Body Behind the conflicts over the validity of majority decision-making, what the indignation of the Observants of Cîteaux, the prudence of the deputies of the clergy, or the slow triumph of the apothecaries reveals is an original mode of constructing the general will that makes

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it the expression of a true collective act of consultation, negotiation, and compromise between particular groups (religious communities, orders, trades), which strive to harmonize their particular interests. This organicist and corporatist vision of the formation of the general will knew nothing of the idea of an invisible hand, which would make a collective decision conforming to the general interest arise from the addition of the personal positions of individuals without statuses, weights, or determinations, and consequently all statistically equal. A just decision was therefore not the product of a mathematical, sta­ tistical operation - the addition of interchangeable, isolated, anony­ mous votes - but the result of a social and juridical operation that put into play and competition thoroughly identified actors whose room for maneuver was determined by their institutional position and who could in no case evade this common work of producing and reproducing the community. Indeed, factums, dictionaries, treatises, as well as official regulations, strongly insisted on the electoral duty of the members of the community: deserting the assembly and abstaining from voting were reprehensible acts, liable to penalties ranging from fines to the permanent deprivation of the right to vote. To the idea of statistical justice and the precise representation of populations, most official texts and juridical works opposed another principle of justice that took into account the stature o f persons, the privileges o f bodies, and the necessity o f procedures: a “good” deci­ sion taken by incompetent or unworthy people, or outside the usual procedures, seemed devoid of value to them.34 In a very revealing way, they therefore insisted on scrupulous respect for the procedures and formalities of voting, which seemed to them to constitute at once a proof of the permanence, solidity, and unity of the institution, a guarantee of autonomy in the face of external interference, a safe­ guard against individual ambitions and subversive maneuverings, and one of the conditions for not seeing every decision or election attacked in court. Consequently, for François des Maisons, “the word election can be defined by these w ords:.. . the choice made of a person who is skillful and able into a dignity, brotherhood, society, or other like thing after having conformed to the form prescribed by the holy canons.”35 The anonymous author of a discourse on the elec­ tions of the Capuchin Order goes even further by judging that the form of the election “constitutes the election; it gives it being and consequently there could be no election if this form were not observed.” For these men of law, who often speak in the name of institutions or at least for those who hold positions of power, it there­ fore matters little whether all the members of the community take

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part in voting or are represented by deputies whose social, profes­ sional, or geographic origins approximate their own: what must be protected first of all is the “form,” since this is what makes each member of this great body that represents the community work together. “Form” curbs individual interests and reduces passions; it obliges each to disinterestedness and devotion to the common good. It is the clearest manifestation of the latter, outside and beyond any idea of social or statistical representativeness. It is this, and not the more or less democratic, free, or representative character of the assembly, that makes the collective decision the product of a collective work and consequently gives it its power to constrain. Domat, a lawyer for the king, thus judges that it is pointless to invite all the members of a community to express themselves, since the regu­ larity of the procedure takes the place of the principle of justice: Election or nomination to municipal offices is made in each town and in each place, not by all the inhabitants together - since there would be too much confusion and such a competition would be illicit - but by those who are named according to the rides and customs to make up the assembly which makes the nomination and must do so accord­ ing to the plurality of votes, observing the prescribed formalities,36

By rejecting, in electoral practice as in the theoretical treatises they devoted to it, statistical reason in favor of juridical reason, the legists and theologians of the early modern era show precisely how the modes of collective decision-making they know and recognize par­ ticipate in the way ancien régime society thought of itself: not as a collection of atomized individuals pursuing different ends and freely expressing their choices in a common public space, but as an assem­ blage of bodies, communities, and companies endowed with statuses, governed by rules, and protected by privileges. To vote was to be in the order, to constitute a body, to belong to one of these multiple bodies that delineated social space. As Trévoux’s dictionary remarks unambiguously: “There is this difference between choice and elec­ tion, that election relates to a body, to a community that chooses, whereas choice says nothing except about the person who makes it.”37 Far from being incompatible with the dominant social repre­ sentation of the social world of the ancien régime monarchy, elec­ tions, and voting constituted one of its most effective bases - until they made their brutal irruption into a political field in the making. (Translated by James Ingram and Loïc Wacquant)

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N o te s

1 Mémoire pour le Sieur Poirier, ancien recteur de PUniversité, ancien procureur de la Nation de France, Professeur de Philosophie au Collège de la Marche, intimé, contre le Sieur Hamelin, Licencié en Théologie, Professeur de Philosophie au Collège Mazarin, Appela?it, Les Doyens et suppôts des Nations de France, de Picardie, de Normandie et d'Allemagne, de la Faculté des Arts de l’Université et le Sieur Lalle­ mand, Professeur de Rhétorique au Collège de la Marche, Vice-Syndic de l’Université (Paris, 1744), M azarin Library, 3318J (item 4). 2

3

4

5

6 7 8

9

10

11

See on this subject the suggestive notes o f Robert D escim on and Alain Guery, “Un État des temps m odernes?,” in Histoire de la France, vol. 4: La longue durée de l’Etat, ed. André Burguière and Jacques Revel (Paris: Seuil/Points, 2 0 0 0 ), pp. 3 2 8 ff. It is nevertheless a rich source, as is suggested by certain revelatory scan­ dals in which one sees an election serving in fact the hereditary or at least familial transm ission o f offices. O n this distinction, see Pierre Bourdieu, “Formes d ’action politique et m odes d’existence des groupes;” in Propos sur le champ politique (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2 0 0 0 ), pp. 8 0 -8 . Here I take up the dem onstration o f Jack R ichon Pole, “The Emergence o f the M ajority Principle in the American R evolu tion ,” in Études sur l’histoire des assemblées d ’Etat, Publications de la section française de la C om m ission internationale pour l’histoire des assem blées d ’Etat (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966), pp. 6 3 -7 2 . Pascal Perrineau and D om inique Reynié, Dictionnaire du vote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2 0 01). M artin H eckei, “Parität,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kan. Abt. 49 (1963): 2 6 1 -4 2 0 . Olivier Christin, “La question du vote majoritaire à l’époque de l’édit de N a n tes,” in L’Édit de Nantes revisité, ed. Lucienne Hubler, JeanDaniel C andaux, and Christophe Chalam et, Publications de l’associa­ tion Suisse pour l’histoire du refuge H uguenot (Geneva: D roz, 2 0 0 0 ), pp. 4 1 -5 4 . Pierre Bourdieu, “Sur les rapports entre la sociologie et l’histoire en Allemagne et en France: entretien avec Lutz R aphael,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 106/7 (M arch 1995): 1 0 8 -2 2 . Bourdieu, “Formes d’action politique et modes d ’existence des groupes,” and “The M ystery of M inistry: From Particular W ills to the General W ill,” chapter 3 in this volum e. Pierre Bourdieu, “Pour une ethnologie des organisations,” unpublished manuscript, 1969: “The sociology o f organizations has to take as its first object organizations, and more precisely the relations that are established between the size, structure, and function o f organizations”;

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13

14

15 16

17

18 19

20

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see also idem, “Effet de champ et effet de corps,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 59 (1985): 73. M. Durand de Maillane, Dictionnaire de droit canonique et de pratique bénéficiale conféré avec les maximes et la jurisprudence de France (Paris, 1781), vol. 1, p. 605: “In matters of election to ecclesiastical positions, it is not permitted to give them by lot.” On all this I follow two anonymous texts, the Défense des règlements faits pour les cardinaux, achevesques et evesques pour la réformation de l'Ordre de Citeaux . . . (Paris, 1656) and La Manière de tenir le chapitre général de l'Ordre de Cîteaux (Paris, 1683). Descimon and Guery, “Un État des temps modernes?”: “Men of the sixteenth century, subjected to their ‘corporatist’ point of view, did not attach the same importance to the difference between appointment and election that we do from our ‘parliamentary’ perspective” (p. 336). Maillane, Dictionnaire de droit canonique, vol. 1, p. 604. Histoire générale de Paris - Les métiers et corporations de la ville de Paris (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1886), vol. 1, patent letters from 1719: “The election of jurors will be on the first day of October, to the plurality of votes, in the house and under the supervision of the pro­ curer of Roy de Châtelet, where the community will be assembled and represented by the acting jurors, the past jurors and twenty current ones, and twenty young masters” (p. 210). Jacques Frayssenge, Millau. Une ville de Rouergue sous l’Ancien Régime (1668-1789). Société catholique et société protestante (Librairie Trémolet, 1990), p. 83. AC BB 13 (1689), cited in ibid., p. 84. Michel Claude Guibert, Mémoires pour servir à l ’histoire de la ville de Dieppe . . . publiées pour la première fois par Michel Hardy (Dieppe, 1878), vol. 1, p. 161. On the question of urban elections, see Robert Descimon, “Le corps de ville et les élections échevinales à Paris aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles: codification coutumière et pratiques sociales,” Histoire, Économie et Société 13 (1994): 507-30, and Jacqueline Dumoulin, Le Consulat d ’Aix-en-Provence. Enjeux politiques, 1598-1692 (Dijon: Presses Universitaires, 1992). Jean Bodin notably takes up the classical distinction of the commentators between situations where the majority rule applies and those where it is necessary to attain the support of each: “Because in all communities, when it is a question of what is common to all individually and separately, the express consent of all is required; but if it is a question of what is common to all indivisibly and conjointly, it suffices that the majority are of one opinion to oblige the remainder” (book III, ch. 7). On the origins of this distinction, see Otto von Gierke, “Uber die Geschichte des Majoritätsprinzipes,” Schmollers Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwal­ tung und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reich 39 (1915): 7-29.

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23 24

25 26 27 28 29

30 31

32

33 34

35 36 37

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Esp. Pier Virginio Aimone-Braida, “II principio maggioritario,” Apobisaris Commentarius lnstituti Utriiusque Juris 58 (1985): 208-85, and Werner Maleczek, “Abstimmungsarten,” lOlff. See the critical analyses of Otto-Gerhard Oexle, notably in “Conjuratio und Gilde im frühen Mit­ telalter. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der sozialgeschichtlichen Kontinuität zwischen Antike und Mittelalter,” in Gilden und Zünfte. Kaufmännische und gewerbliche Genossenschaften im frühen und hohen Mittelalter, Berent Schivinekoeper (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1985), pp. 151-214. Lyon Municipal Library, General Collection, MS 1084, Assemblée de Melun 1578-1580, file 2, emphasis added. “In the first place, they protested that they had not come to make an assembled body but only to get to know one another and know which provinces had arrived and which had yet to arrive” (ibid., files 8-9). Ibid., file 49. Ibid., file 57. Cited by Jean-Louis Flandrin in Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montari, eds., Histoire de l’alimentation (Paris: Fayard, 1996), p. 494. Histoire générale de Paris, vol. 1, pp. 512f, 519f, and 524-5. See the text of Louis XII’s letters of patent approving the new statutes of 1514 in response to a petition from'the apothecaries: “When the aforementioned supplicants and simple spice merchants had assembled to elect jurors and custodians of the apothecary order, the aforemen­ tioned simple spice merchants, who were much greater in number than were the supplicants, elected persons who were knowledgeable about the state and market by intrigue and monopoly.” Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris (1783), ed. J.-C. Bonnet (Paris: Mercure de France, 1994), vol. 2, p. 1406. Alfred Franklin, La Vie privée d ’autrefois. Arts et métiers, modes, mœurs, usages des parisiens du X IIe au X V IIIe siècle d’après des docu­ ments originaux ou inédits, “Les médicaments” (Paris, 1891), pp. 1-87. See the edict of August 1776 and the declaration of April 1777, cited by Mercel Marion, Dictionnaire des institutions de la France d ’Ancien Régime aux X V IIe et X V IIIe siècles, new edn (Paris: Picard, 1984). See Christin, “La question du vote majoritaire,” passim, for examples. On this distinction, see Bourdieu, “Formes d’action politique et modes d’existence des groupes,” pp. 80-8, and Isabelle Bouvigneis, “La résis­ tance comme cadre de la mutation théologico-politique du droit,” in Jean-Claude Zancarini, ed., Le Droit de résistance X II-X X e siècles (Paris: ENS Éditions, 1999), esp. pp. 118-19. François des Maisons, Les Définitions du droit canon, contenant un recueil fort exact. .. (Paris, 1671-4), vol. 1, p. 140, emphasis added. Jean Domat, Les Lois civiles dans leur ordre natural (Paris, 1745), Titre XVI, sect. IV art. 4. Dictionnaire universal français et latin (dit de Trévoux), ed. 1752, vol. 3, cols 602-4.

6 “ Making the People Speak” : On the Social Uses of and Reactions to Public Opinion Polls Patrick Champagne

The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu is, from the outset, a sociology that one can call “political” in the fundamental sense that it developed in close connection with major political questions that have shaken French society since the fifties: first, the Algerian war; then, under Gaullism, false cultural democratization exemplified by the policy of creation of “Maisons de la culture”; the crisis of the education system as an agency contributing to reproduction of the social inequality; and, later, the closure onto itself of the political world, the transfor­ mation of the structure of social classes, followed by the effects of neoliberal policies of state abandonment, etc.1 More precisely, this sociology is closely connected with democratic ideology, not because Bourdieu was a naïve defender of the latter, but because this politi­ cal ideal can be treated as a kind of pure theoretical model, sociol­ ogy then taking up the task of showing the distance to realization of the model - that is to say, uncovering the specifically social obstacles to its accomplishment. Thus, when we consider the notion of “equality of opportunity,” which was at the heart of Bourdieu’s first works on the school system, we see that it is a notion that arises and spreads in and through a democratic political field, which Bourdieu treats as a statistical bench­ mark for measuring the objective inequality of chances, or, if one prefers, the gap that is socially established between the ideal and

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the reality. This idea, which would be specified in the more operational concept of “probability of access” (to higher education or other valued cultural goods or social positions) or “objective chances” (of adopting such behavior or possessing such property), has in fact the strictly scientific aim of recalling that it is not suffi­ cient to decree equality under the law in order to establish ipso facto equality in fact. Worse still, Bourdieu insists that, as one sees with the ideology of the “liberating school” that has stamped the opera­ tion of French educational institutions for over a century,2 the po­ litical proclamation of purely formal equality tends to conceal, to legitimate, and finally to reinforce real inequalities. Here we see that this sociology is political in a second sense: it enables and even invites a political action that is better informed sci­ entifically, and thereby more likely to be efficient or effective. Thus, in the conclusion to The Inheritors, Bourdieu laid the foundations of a “rational pedagogy” which, instead of postulating the formal equal­ ity of the students, would take into account real cultural inequality before the school so as to make the transmission of knowledge more successful and thereby truly democratize education.3 Similarly, the conclusion of The Love o f Art proposed concrete measures to make museums more accessible to the least educated segments of the pop­ ulation. Or again, one can invoke here the highly distinctive con­ struction of a book like The Weight o f the World, which was explicitly conceived to help sociology achieve the widest possible entry into current political debate, the ambitious object of this work being to contribute to the greatest possible democratization of the discoveries of sociology itself, so that everyone could defend himself or herself against the symbolic violence that is at the heart of processes of social domination.4

F o rm al D e m o c ra c y and Real D e m o c ra c y

Adopting a resolutely neo-Kantian approach that was also that of Durkheim, Bourdieu thus questioned from his first works, irrespec­ tive of their object, be it museum attendance, academic success, the uses of photography, or access to the production of a personal opinion, what he called the “social conditions of possibility” of social practices and behaviors. Just as a “true” democratization of the edu­ cational system presupposes taking into account existing cultural inequalities before the school,5 the establishment of “true” political democracy implies taking into account the unequal ability and incli-

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nation of individuals to produce properly political opinions. The pub­ lication of The Inheritors in 1964, which revealed the vastly unequal probability of young people entering university according to their social origins and the decisive role played by inherited cultural capital in educational selection, marked a break in the sociology of educa­ tion as well as in education policy and politics by smashing the shared illusion of the “liberating” effect of the school.6 This is the same approach that Bourdieu would later apply when, at the end of the 1960s, the question of the reliability of the technology of public opinion polls arose, and secondarily the question of whether their use was legitimate in politics. This problem crystallized around 1965 when this new practice, entirely controlled by specialists in political science, was widely introduced in French political life on the occa­ sion of the first French presidential election by universal suffrage. Very quickly the purely technical reliability of this first published political poll, which belonged to the highly particular category of preelection polls, led to a wave of enthusiasm at once political and com­ mercial that triggered a proliferation of political polls of all kinds, which came to be widely published and commented upon in the press: they included voting intention polls, of course (more often than not conducted outside election campaigns, which substantially changes their nature), but also opinion polls on the most diverse subjects on the agenda of national political life which were conducted, not for scientific ends (to dissect, for example, the logic of the production of opinions in politics), but for the openly political ends of legitimating or delegitimating the policies pursued by the government in place by implying that “the people are with us” or “against you.” This intrusion of a new actor into the operation of the democratic political game did not occur without giving rise to debates and polemics, first of all in the political field, which was directly con­ cerned, and then in the field of the social sciences, from which the practice originated. Thus some politicians asked aloud if any credi­ bility was to be granted to pre-election polls - especially when these were carried out several months before voting day - and whether their predictive value in elections had to be recognized. Others asked themselves what legitimacy should be accorded to this new way of grasping “public opinion” that was henceforth allegedly captured by these polling surveys with the precision and above all the warrant of science. Were not politicians then dispossessed of the right to speak and incarnate the “popular will” by polls presented as a veritable substitute for direct democracy, as the people (or at least a sample supposed to be representative of them) were now able to be consulted directly and continuously to know what they thought or wanted? If

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some, especially among journalists and political commentators, considered the entry of polls into political life as a mark of a true “progress of democracy,” others - first among them professional politicians produced by and devoted to the various political appara­ tuses - worried about the increasing weight acquired by this new social technology which, at least implicitly, presumed to dictate to political decision-makers the course of action to take. Would the reading of polls by political scientists not lead, in other words, to a certain demagoguery in politics?

Does Public O p in io n Exist?

This growing importance of polls in political life and, especially in France, the omnipresence of political scientists (increasingly drawn from the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris or “Science-Po”8) who conceived them and then commented on them in the press, had thus led a number of political observers and abtors to pose the prejudicial question of their scientific value. There would be, in the then-nascent practice of opinion polling in France, a “before” and an “after” Bourdieu, who formulated the crux of the issues it posed in a lecture, given in 1971 and published two years later in Les Temps modernes, entitled, in deliberately provocative fashion, “Public Opinion Does Not Exist.”9 In this article, Bourdieu demonstrated that this new public opinion was a pure artifact manufactured by pollsters and therefore, as he elaborated in conclusion, that it did not exist “in the meaning implicitly assumed by those who make opinion polls or those who make use of their results.” This article immediately created a great stir among political scientists and pollsters, “these apparent scientists of appearance” according to Bourdieu’s murderous formula. For them, it was in effect a sort of scientific call to order in a domain crowded with the most naïve political problematics, and thus it constituted a significant obstacle to their ideological enterprise, more unconscious than conscious, aimed at imposing polls as a dem­ ocratic technology for “making the people speak.” Yet in this article Bourdieu merely recalled some elementary epis­ temological principles that impose themselves on all questionnaire surveys, including opinion surveys. Drawing on the secondary analy­ sis of opinion studies conducted by polling institutes over a ten-year period on the topic of education, as well as on a spontaneous sample survey that he had undertaken directly through the press on the crisis in the education system shortly after the events of May ’68 (asking

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interested readers of a magazine to respond to a set of questions that had been at the center of public debate), Bourdieu explained that the simple fact of asking a representative sample of the voting-age pop­ ulation the same closed question, as in a political referendum, and adding up the answers formally collected in order to give a picture of what political opinion would be in the form of a single percent­ age (to be able to say, for example, that 55 percent of French people support such-and-such a policy measure) rests on a set of presup­ positions that are no doubt those of the democratic ideology in pol­ itics but are not borne out by the facts and must therefore be grasped as such by scientific analysis. By thus vigorously opposing this smug­ gling of a political problematic into the terrain of the social sciences, and by refusing to confuse “purely formal democracy,” with its implicit assumption that all citizens are politically competent, with “real democracy” and its actually existing social agents unequally equipped and inclined to acquire and express political views, Bourdieu elicited a number of reactions, especially from political scientists, that were closer to political invective than to properly scientific debate.10 Bourdieu’s demonstration was nevertheless irresistible, which probably explains why more than 30 years later the article in ques­ tion remains a reference in this domain and a continuing inspiration to critical studies of the production of public opinion.11 It showed in effect that the mere fact of asking the same question of a sample of socially and culturally highly heterogeneous individuals, such as those who continuously get queried by polling institutes, out of political rather than scientific need, before adding together the responses thus obtained, amounts implicitly to postulating three propositions that are demonstrably false. In the first place, such a survey setup pre­ supposes that all the individuals have personal opinions on the matter at hand, which is refuted not only by spontaneous sample surveys but also by the distribution of “non responses” (does not know, refuses to answer, answer falls outside the pre-coded categories) in the inquiries conducted by the polling institutes themselves. In the second place, the fact of asking closed questions, which leads to col­ lecting not opinions but pre-formed answers to opinion questions, implies the hypothesis that all those surveyed ask themselves the ques­ tions that are asked of them (or at least that they would be able to wonder about them), which is refuted, once again, by comprehension tests on the meaning of the questions that have been carried out among those surveyed. Finally, in the third place, to add up the answers thus produced presupposes that all the opinions are equiva­ lent and have the same social weight, whereas everything indicates

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that the capacity of individuals to give weight to their particular opinion in the political field is strongly connected to the power of the social groups that can be mobilized on its behalf, as well as to the social status, relational capital, and position that these individuals occupy in the class structure. In short, Bourdieu reminded us that opinions count politically only when they are carried or backed by social forces. With this article, which was deliberately published in a generalist intellectual journal rather than a strictly scientific one,12 Bourdieu wanted to fight at once politically and scientifically against the belief, already widespread in the press and in political circles, in the scientificity of the practice of opinion polling. He wanted to enable the citizenry beyond the scientific community to understand that polling institutes not only do not measure true movements of collec­ tive views and sentiments, but authorize all manner of misrepresen­ tations of the answers to their questionnaires because these are made in total ignorance of the facts by those surveyed - in short, that these institutes are engaged in a kind of illegitimate exercise of science. Lastly, he stressed that the “public opinion” of the pollsters obscures a much more real “public opinion” than the one they man­ ufacture on their computer printouts: to wit, that which is con­ structed by the public action of the interest groups that traditional political science knows very well and refers to under the notions of “lobby” or “groupe de pression,” which cannot be reduced to a simple percentage in abstraction from the tensions that pervade the social structure.

Reasons fo r th e In itia l R ejectio n o f Polling in F ran ce

This political-scientific intervention by Bourdieu, which prefigured in many respects those he would carry out after 1995 with the books in the “Liber-Raisons d’Agir” series, came at an opportune moment, just when the practice of polling was being widely diffused in French media and politics. The rapid success of this practice was a novel and surprising development, since attempts to introduce polling in France had been made well before the 1960s: various governments since the end of World War II had ordered numerous studies through the French Institute for Public Opinion (IFOP). This institute, the first of its kind, had been created in 1939 by a French academic, Jean Stoetzel, on the model of Gallup in the United States. But the polls

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it conducted at that time had little public impact and hence little effect on the political game. The reasons for this were, first, that the results of these surveys remained highly confidential and were neither pub­ lished nor commented upon in the press, so that in a sense they did not exist politically; and, secondly and above all, that their sponsors themselves did not really know what to do with the results of these peculiar “miniature electoral consultations.” One may even question whether politicians actually granted any credit to these surveys, as everything leads one to think that they actually did not “believe” in the information supplied by opinion polls. And, besides, why should they have believed in them when the press, which is to say readers and therefore voters, did not believe in them either - some largecirculation newspapers, after a few fruitless attempts, had quickly given up ordering polls with a view to publication, as these studies, held in very low regard by the “serious” dailies (such as Le Monde and Le Figaro) that dominated the journalist field, had had no detectible effect on sales. There were good sociological reasons for such disinterest in this political technology. They resided at once in the institutional func­ tioning of the political field as it existed under the Fourth Republic (1945-58) and in the politically effective representations of “public opinion” that held currency in this space given the logics that gov­ erned it. On the one hand, what political scientists called the “party regime” and electoral laws that seriously distorted the parliamentary representation of political forces rendered almost impossible any serious prediction of the future composition of the national assem­ bly and a fortiori of the designation of the head of government which was of paramount interest, if not to the voters, at least to the political actors and journalists - on the sole basis of polls of the voting intentions of the electoral body. This sufficed to make this type of survey of little practical interest. On the other hand, as witnessed, among other indicators, by the publication in 1956 of the book by Alfred Sauvy devoted to “public opinion” in a mass-market series,13 what in practice went under this notion at the time had more to do with the strategies of pressure groups and evolving sectoral mobi­ lizations around particular issues than with the referendum-type general consultations such as survey polls could produce (or give the illusion of producing). No doubt, some politicians, following the example of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had sought, by resorting to modern means of com­ munication (radio, then television), to short-circuit the games of the parliamentary microcosm by directly and regularly addressing the electorate, which is to say by calling on “public opinion” as witness

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to the policies undertaken. These attempts, generally frowned upon by professionals of politics as they aimed to bypass them, can in hindsight be considered as the premises of the very general transformation that would characterize the functioning of the political field and later routinize the technology of polling after the sixties. But, until General de Gaulle’s rise to power in 1958, politics played out essentially in parliament or, more precisely, in the corridors of the national assembly and of the party headquarters, that is, in those closed quarters where shifting and often ephemeral political alliances were negotiated. M arx wrote that capitalists dream of “a bourgeois society without the proletariat”; some ana­ lysts of the French political system said at the time that the Fourth Republic had succeeded in establishing “a democracy without the people.” The cataclysmic institutional changes that marked the advent of the Fifth Republic in 1958 for a time marginalized the members of the national assembly to the benefit of the executive. The direct and frequent consultation of the electoral body by General de Gaulle after his unexpected return to power, who repëatedly turned to referenda and directly addressed the nation in televised speeches - which were then new and denounced by the opposition parties, though they seemed almost to have been called forth by the generalized diffusion of the new media (television ownership became common in France only from the 1960s) - and the exceptional political circumstances of the time (the resolution of the broiling colonial conflict in Algeria), helped impose the idea that “public opinion” was not that of the elected representatives (the deputies) but that of the whole electorate as directly consulted. The establishment, by the referendum of 1962, of the election of the president by universal suffrage reinforced a seemingly ineluctable process which had tended continually to enlarge what the political field places under the rubric of “public opinion” since the beginning of the nineteenth century, in step especially with the rise in the level of education of the population and the development of modern means of communication. Public opinion was no longer, as it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the opinions publicly debated by the sole elected representatives of a people that was still mostly illiterate and rural, and for this reason politically marginalized; nor, as at the beginning of the twentieth century, the opinions publicly expressed by those, such as journalists and union representatives for example, who considered themselves to be the true spokespersons of the popular classes or the electorate; nor even of that fraction of cit­ izens who mobilize around a given issue and publicly demonstrate

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their will through street marches. The public opinion that gradually came to be considered legitimate and which, for that very reason, has to be taken into account in political decision making, now tended to be the whole citizenry, the only remaining issue being to know who can say what the people think and want.14

Making the People Speak But, as a result of this change, the public opinion that emerged little by little in the 1960s was no longer readily knowable, since it could no longer be reduced to the loud public position-takings of the leaders of parties, unions, and associations, nor to the spectacular marches of activists or occasional protestors. It was principally made, according to an expression that would appear at the close of that decade (and spread in the wake of May ’68), by the “silent majorities” who thus had to be made to speak in order to be known. The polling institutes, largely colonized by political scientists, would be the instrument of this veritable process of inversion that explains the various forms of reti­ cence and resistance of a considerable segment of the political world with regard to the technology of polls: in effect, public opinion is no longer the (rather freely concocted) addition of the opinions of those who have an opinion on a given issue and who, above all, mobilize to make it publicly known and strive to impose it on political decision­ makers by means of lobbying or spectacular public actions; it is the product of the mobilization o f survey-takers who look for answers among a sample of the non-mobilized majority of individuals who are nonetheless supposed to be statistically representative of the entire electoral body. In other words, public opinion tends henceforth to be politically constructed by questioning a sample of a population, the great majority of whom, as Bourdieu recalled in his 1973 article, may have no pre-constituted opinion on the problem posed to them - or imposed upon them - by the questionnaire, and who are even less ready to mobilize and defend a given stance or to thrust it onto political offi­ cials. A new ideological couple thus arises in the reconfigured political field, formed by opposition between the “active minorities,” which are by definition unrepresentative of the electoral body, and the “silent majority,” who are politically representative but inactive. Inasmuch as political action is almost always the product of the action of concerned and determined minorities that seek to enroll from among the quiet, non-mobilized, and unconcerned majority, who do not see the need to change the world, one understands that this irruption of public opinion

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polls into the political field was perceived as a conservative, if not rightist, political initiative. Pierre Bourdieu effected a veritable revolution in the social sciences by showing, for many of the objects that were at the center of endless scholastic debates (Do “social classes” exist? How can one define “culture” ? What is a true “intellectual” ? What constitutes “the family,” etc.),15 that the sociologist does not have to, and indeed should not, impose his own definition of these semi-scientific con­ cepts, by positing false preliminary definitions of the type, “By ‘social class’ or ‘intellectual’ or ‘culture,’ I shall mean . . . , ” that destroy the very object of scientific inquiry in advance. Instead, he or she should take as his or her object the properly social struggle of which these concepts are the stake in a given society and time and the social func­ tions that they fulfill.16 We can extend Bourdieu’s analysis of the clas­ sification struggles in the making of social collectives to the idea of “public opinion”: it cannot admit of a “scientific” definition, con­ trary to what pollsters and political scientists believe, as the putting into numerical form they effect is nothing but the dressing up of current political common sense o'r, if one>*prefers, to the democratic doxa of the moment. The quick recapitulation of the trajectory of the notion of public opinion sketched in the foregoing suffices to show that there exists no definition in itself of “public opinion” since it is a notion that pertains to political metaphysics, and not science, and which furthermore emerges from struggles between the various parties and forces that vie to impose the definition of it that best suits their specific interests. It is also for this reason that the concrete contents of the notion of public opinion are necessarily variable, since the latter is always closely tied to a given historical state of the political field and depends on the relations of material and especially symbolic power between actors in the political game.17 In other words, the sociologist can only report on a social definition of this notion and has the task of explain­ ing why and how it obtains, and with what consequences. One can then discern better the veritable symbolic coup that was effected by political scientists with the silent support of the whole weight of the political field: it resides essentially in the fact that they succeeded in making people (and making themselves) believe that a scientific def­ inition of this notion is possible or, what amounts to the same thing, that the mere fact of expressing it in the form of statistical percent­ ages allows for the transmutation of a politically uncertain and there­ fore contestable idea into a scientific concept that would henceforth be undisputable.

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What were the effects of the irruption of polls and of this new definition of “public opinion” upon the political game and on the decision making of elected officials? Pollsters first intruded upon the electoral process by providing voting intentions in the form of exact figures before the election, which practically amounted to an election prediction a few days ahead of the vote. It was a large-circulation popular newspaper, France-Soir, and not a high-brow political news­ paper (such as Le Monde), that first published this type of poll in 1965 on the occasion of France’s first presidential election by uni­ versal suffrage. The risk of error as well as the fear of the potential impact that this publication could have on the election results never­ theless worried journalists enough that the daily took precautions: according to the well-known journalistic technique that consists, in the case of a debate, of running a column “for” and a column “against” (as in letters from the readers, for example), the paper reported on two polls with contradictory results: the one by IFOP predicted that General de Gaulle would not win outright in the first round, contrary to what was believed by nearly all political com­ mentators; the other was culled from field surveys conducted by a state information agency linked to the Ministry of the Interior, which was of quite dubious value, and forecast the election of the sitting president in the first round. This “first” displayed the know-how of specialists in electoral sociology to whom the polling institutes had appealed for commentary and on whom they would henceforth rely heavily to “interpret,” in a seemingly scientific and therefore neutral way, the results of polls. The IFOP prediction turned out to be correct: de Gaulle was forced into a second-round ballot. It was in fact the relative reliability of this first pre-election poll that explains the attempts at manipulation that would quickly appear subsequently: the political world and the journalists would use the pre-election poll for political ends and would try especially to influence the thinking and decisions of the electors and political officials through it. Newspapers and political parties had a growing number of polls produced and published whose questions were more or less biased (on the name recognition of this and that candidate, the electoral chances of different parties, etc.) and even reported on completely imaginary or faked polls by phantom agencies. In fact, the publication of fake polls became sufficiently frequent that politicians decided to put a stop to them in 1977 by creating a control commission entrusted with verifying the material reality of studies and the fairness of the questions asked by pollsters.

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A R ecu rrin g y e t S tu n te d D e b a te

It must be stressed that this new practice was established in a national context that largely explains the fact that it was perceived from the outset mostly as “manipulative” and thus prejudicial to the dignity of political struggle and universal suffrage. The electoral campaign of this first presidential contest by universal suffrage was indeed marked by the arrival of publicists who, with apparent success, devised the electoral campaigns and managed to “sell” certain can­ didates by using, as in the United States, methods then utilized in the economic realm. And, inasmuch as these new specialists in “political communication” relied fundamentally, like their American counter­ parts whose techniques they imported into France, on techniques of marketing, that is, on polling studies (to test the image of candidates and the campaign themes with various subcategories of electors and to track daily the effects of the campaign), one readily understands why this technology was strongly denounced by the most tradition­ alist fraction of the political class - all the more so as these surveys were apparently not without practical efficacy. If they decried the fact that certain candidates were being sold “like soap bars,” it was also because these techniques seemed to work. Pre-election surveys proliferated, but so did studies by political sci­ entists on the effects of these studies on the behavior of the electorate. Did polls not threaten the electoral logic symbolized by the voting booth? Did they not seek to influence the voter’s decision by giving him or her the result of the vote in advance? Should the voter not be left to decide according to his or her soul and conscience? Did the publication of voting intentions before a ballot was cast, which are broadly presented and perceived as predictions, not alter the inten­ tions of the voters, especially given the more or less partisan com­ mentaries that accompany their publication? As a matter of fact, political scientists tried to discern the possible effects that the publi­ cation just before an election of its foreseeable result could have on voters. Would it not demobilize the voters of the party that is sup­ posed to carry the day and mobilize its opponents? Or the reverse?18 According to these analysts, who were typically delighted with this debate because it confirmed them in their self-appointed role of pure observers, “scientists” objectively analyzing the electoral campaign, exerting no effects on the political game but restricted to dissecting it, all French and American studies seemed to show that pre-election polls have little or no effect on the vote because very few voters change their choice as a result of published polls and, besides, these

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changes, according to these studies, would be miraculously distrib­ uted among all the camps in contention so that voting shifts, already minor in themselves, would tend to cancel one another out. Although the practice of polling is now fully integrated into the routine functioning of the political field, we see this debate on polling in democratic politics reappear in the media with each election, with the same exchange of arguments virtually unchanged for more than 30 years. On the one side, the partisans of polls (those who are “for” ) - that is, political scientists as well as large fractions of the political and media milieu who regard themselves as “modernists” and “lib­ erals” (in the nineteenth-century European sense of favoring individ­ ualism and “laissez-faire” ) - defend this technique, which they judge to be both “democratic” and “scientific,” and which, they claim, contributes to enriching political debate to the extent that polls give “citizens” and politicians reliable information that enables them to reach decisions with foreknowledge of possible outcomes. On the other side, the opponents of polls (those who are “against” ), who are also to be found in part among the more tradition-bound sectors of politicians and journalists, but more so in intellectual circles: the reasons they invoke, which similarly claim to be both political and scientific, appear no less well founded. Taking up to a greater or lesser extent certain criticisms formulated by Bourdieu, they contest the reli­ ability of polls, with their excessively small samples, dubious rectifi­ cation of results, badly posed and leading questions, and the abusive or (imposed) interpretation of responses. They explain that the mul­ tiplication of such polls, which are sometimes faked and often irrel­ evant, disturbs the serenity of the elector at the moment of voting and contributes to modifying the “normal” result of elections. In short, for some, polls are a vehicle for the enhancement of democratic politics, while, for others, they fundamentally pervert it.19 Because of the very excesses they give rise to in this domain (during the three or four months preceding a national election the French media report a new voting intention poll practically every day), presi­ dential election campaigns are especially revealing of the tensions at work in the political field on this question, the introduction of polling technology into this highly peculiar space of play having carried the debate on their pertinence to its climax. Pollsters are at once omnipresent and heavily criticized in today’s political field, often for quite bad reasons. Politicians who do not hesitate to invoke polls when they are favorable to them are quick indeed to denounce them when they turn unfavorable. Similarly, the journalists who contribute to placing polls at the heart of election campaigns are not the last to criticize them or to report, often too late, on the precautions that

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would need to be taken when interpreting their results (the margin of error, “the instantaneous character of the poll, which is valid only at the time it was conducted,” etc.), especially when the voting results invalidate the predictions that the specialists believed they were enti­ tled to make on the basis of pre-election surveys, as was the case in France in the 1995 presidential election and even more spectacularly in the 2002 presidential contest.20

A n Expanding M a rk e t

It would be naïve to believe that Bourdieu’s article could have suf­ ficed to put an end to this ideological use of opinion polls. The prac­ tical functions they fulfill are such that politicians and journalists seem no longer able to do without them - not to mention the vested interests of pollsters. This no doubt has to do in large part with the fact that polls are explicitly conceived and adjusted to answer directly to the most immediate and interested preoccupations, so that, even when they are misinterpreted, such surveys supply their consumers with data that are useful to them and which, because they are already structured according to the very logic of the political field, have greater predictive value, in principle, than the intuitive and unme­ thodical evaluations that politicians and media commentators used to make before the advent of political polling. Politicians are obviously the choice clients of the polling institutes. These institutes supply them with confidential data to elaborate their electoral strategies as well as data to be published to produce politi­ cal effects in hopes of furthering their strategies. Public opinion polls strictly speaking make possible the construction of indicators (“signals”) of the “state of opinion” or are published and used as a specific political resource when it is necessary, for example, to make people believe that a majority of citizens support such-and-such a view or political measure (legitimation effect). As for pre-election polls, they allow for the “testing” of the election prospects of various politicians and hence influence the choice of candidates (thus oper­ ating as instruments o f prediction or simulation). It is well known, moreover, that polling institutes are increasingly consulted to orient day-to-day government policy (at least with regard to its media dimension) as well as the electoral campaigns of different parties. In particular, they allow parties to follow the “ratings” of candidates as a function of their “performance” on the varied stages set by the jour­ nalistic field, and they help determine the themes to place at the center

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of their platform because they best attract voters. They also give the party leadership an idea of the foreseeable balance of political forces and thus help them define strategies of political alliance, allegiance, or regrouping. If the introduction of polling has unquestionably modified the representation of political activity, it remains that this practice is seamlessly merged into the logic of the most traditional political work, which consists especially in translating options and choices conceived and worked out in the restricted milieu of politi­ cal professionals into propositions able to garner the greatest possi­ ble support of lay audiences or, more precisely, of those categories of the population preferentially targeted by each partisan organization given its position in the political field.2' The political poll thus par­ takes of a very general process o f rationalization o f public action (a “decision-making aid,” as the pollsters like to say), equally observ­ able in the economic sector, which uses, among others, the technical resources that can be supplied by the social sciences. But, however much they proliferate, the polls ordered by political headquarters are nonetheless not those that are at the origin of the public debate on this question. In fact, most of these polls are ignored by the broader public, and even by journalists, because they remain confidential and are reserved for the consumption of political mar­ keting specialists operating backstage in all the major parties to prepare and monitor the campaigns. This is not the case for polls ordered by the press, which are explicitly intended to be published and commented upon. Now, if the political poll has met with success among the media (especially the national broadcast media) that matches its success among political actors, the fact that it is published produces effects on the political game that are no less important for being much more visible. The success of political polls among jour­ nalists rests, first, as among politicians, on the fact that this type of survey seems patterned after an election, to which is added the appar­ ent scientific rigor that would render them incontestable. The methodological problems that this type of survey poses, which were raised by Bourdieu 30 years ago, still do not seem to be truly under­ stood and thus taken into account by journalists, mostly because their training in the social sciences is weak but also because the logic of the media pushes them, in general, toward simplification or at the very least toward a political reading of these polls as opposed to their detailed analysis. Polls in effect are a “product” particularly well suited to the strictly technical and political constraints that bear on the production of the news today. Unlike the traditional “man-in-thestreet” interviews of the broadcast media,22 they make it possible to wed speed with the trappings of science: their numerical presentation

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has the appearance of objectivity and neutrality, qualities that are today formally appealed to by the main television networks. They also make it possible to manufacture “events” and “scoops” practi­ cally at will (“A Surprising New Poll Reveals T h a t. . . , ” “Exclusive: The French Evaluate America,” etc.). They thus have a suppleness that is well adapted to the imperatives of topicality and increased competition. But it is above all in the political realm that the practice of polling has become most widespread, no doubt because these surveys allow journalists (especially in the audiovisual sector) to intervene directly in political struggle with a legitimacy of their own as they enable them to interview politicians without taking the uncomfortable position of merely seeming to “advertise” for them or, what amounts to the same thing, of being “politically engaged” or partisan journalists.23 Thanks to constant polling, journalists have become the scientifically guar­ anteed spokesmen of what “the people” - which is to say the televi­ sion audience - really “think,” popularity ratings and public opinion polls being inquiries that are so irrecusable for politicians that the latter order them themselves. As for voting intention polls, they allow the creation of real suspense in an election campaign which, day by day, helps to sustain the interest of readers and viewers, the major­ ity of whom are not much interested in political debates, in what may be complex, difficult, specialized, and thus uninteresting issues to lay people. In short, polls make possible an attractive presentation of political struggle modeled on sports competition or the clash of salient personalities, which are more familiar to the “broader public.”

P olitical C ritiq u e and S cien tific C ritiq u e

The most radical critique of the use of opinion polls in politics (which would also be the most effective) would consist, for the press, to stop ordering them and to cease publishing their results - in short, to delib­ erately ignore them, as France’s semi-official newspaper Le M onde did until the end of the 1970s. If this kind of critique in action has hardly been practiced by the media, the latter have, on the other hand, been quite accommodating to a routinized “soft” critique of polls that has become fully integrated, as it were, into the practice itself. Everything happens as if this critique came as the counterpoint to the intense publicization of polls, expressing a kind of nagging “bad conscience” among political journalists who consume them in

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a manner that they themselves deem excessive, perhaps because they intuitively perceive their negative effects on democratic debate. In the last analysis, this sort of built-in critique, which is now common in most of the major media, allows for the almost daily publication of polls while giving the impression that one should not believe them too much or attach too much importance to them: journalists publish percentages, but often with a hint of irony or marking an apparent distance (“this is only a poll . . . “if the latest poll is to be believed . . .”) that seems intended to communicate a certain lack of faith in them to the public. And when newspapers decide to devote a special report to denouncing “the great manipulation of polls,” as they do for nearly every general election, it is most often just another occasion to indirectly advertise the different polling institutions, whose representatives are presented to their best advantage and given a platform whence to justify themselves at length and establish the “scientific” credentials of their home polls. Even the critiques that appear to situate themselves on strictly sci­ entific terrain in fact nearly always remain on that of politics. Thus, when pollsters are criticized, it is not because, as Bourdieu showed, the practice is in itself deceptive but only because the pollsters were wrong in not predicting the candidates’ correct scores or ranking in a particular election. It is a matter of a circumstantial critique which, in all logic, signifies that, contrariwise, these same pollsters would have been commended by these very same analysts if, as is quite often the case, their predictions had been close to the actual scores. In such a case, their “astonishing science” would have been praised. A debate would have been proposed, with the same assurance with which the pollsters are condemned, not on the validity of polls but on the utility of voting, since a simple pre-election poll would seem to be able to call the election in an almost infallible manner. Polling would have been extolled as a rational instrument of democracy that allows it to economize on traditional procedures, which, like elections or referenda, would be judged “archaic,” “too cumbersome,” and “too costly” in time and money. In fact, what the media debates on polls always overlook is that the introduction of this technology into public debate has profoundly affected the legitimate representations o f political practice by shaking - especially among the professionals of politics - the elementary structures of perception of politics and the rules that hitherto pre­ vailed in electoral competition. In the end, political polls allow one to know too well what has to be said to the electorate to fool them (at least in the short term) and to tell them what they want to hear.

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Political polling, which opened the way to political marketing, tends to align the logic of the political field with that of the economic field and contributes for its part to the crisis of faith in the political game that can be observed today in many liberal democracies, as attested, among other indicators, by the rising rates of electoral abstention. Insofar as they do not serve to analyze the operation of the political field, as Bourdieu proposed, but instead insinuate themselves within the very logic of its operation, polls tend to be nothing but an instru­ ment for the rational manipulation of election campaigns, as candi­ dates can now know day by day the effect of their public statements and promises on voting intentions. Far from making democracy progress toward the ideal it claims to incarnate, polls have become the agent and emblem of political cynicism par excellence. Moreover, by conducting these kinds of instant mini-referenda that claim to measure the “popular will” in a precise, incontrovertible, and con­ tinuous manner, pollsters cannot but contribute to weakening the representative logic that characterized the previous state of the democratic regime, which was an obstacle to systematic demagoguery even as it created a break between political professionals and the profane public. Democracy presupposes spaces of debate, time for reflection, the diffusion of useful and reliable information, so that cit­ izens can make up their minds with full knowledge of the facts - in short, a set of conditions that are bypassed or negated from the outset by the routine practice of polling in politics. (Translated by Loïc Wacquant and James Ingram) N otes 1

See, respectively, Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad, Le Déracine­ ment. La crise de l’agriculture algérienne (Paris: Minuit, 1964); Pierre Bourdieu with Alain Darbel and Dominique Schnapper, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public (Cambridge: Polity, 1990 [1966]); Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, The Inheritors: French Students and their Relation to Culture (Paris: Minuit, 1966), and idem, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (London: Sage, 1977 [1970]); several key articles on political representation pub­ lished by Pierre Bourdieu in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales in the 1980s, including “Political Representation: Elements for a Theory of the Political Field” (1981) and “Delegation and Political Fetishism” (1984), both reprinted in his Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John Thompson (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), pp. 171-202 and 203-19; also “The Mystery of the Ministry: From Particular Wills to the General

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Will” (2002), chapter 3 in this volume; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the judgment o f Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984 [1979]); anti Pierre Bourdieu et al., The Weight o f the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1999 [1993]). On the continual fusion between sociological research and political critique in Bourdieu’s intellectual practice more generally, see chapter 4 by Poupeau and Discepolo. The ideology of the “liberating school” is closely tied to the establish­ ment of secular, free, mandatory education at the beginning of the Third Republic in France (1870-1914). It postulates the formal equality of all students before academic verdicts and sees the specifically economic inequality of families as the only source of disparity in schooling, and the sole cause of differential academic elimination. In this vision, the system of scholarships granted by the state to worthy students from the lower classes is both necessary and sufficient to correct inequalities before the school. This was amplified two decades later by the official report to President Mitterrand, “Propositions for an Education of the Future” (see “Le rapport du Collège de France. Pierre Bourdieu s’explique,” La Quinzaine littéraire 445 (August 1985): 8-10). Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World, and the interview “Notre État de misère,” L’Express, 18 March 1994, pp. 112-15. The scare quotes here signify only that the sociologist does not claim to give a scientific definition of “real” democracy - an object of inter­ minable debates because it is political by nature and thus essentially contested - but that the simple comparison between what democratic ideology claims to achieve and reality produces by itself effects of knowledge. On the scientific and political effect of the formulation of the “theory of reproduction” and its perennial misinterpretation, see Franck Poupeau, Une Sociologie d’Etat. L'école et ses experts en France (Paris: Raisons d’agir Éditions, Cours et travaux, 2003), pp. 27-53. We must stress here that a pre-election poll is not strictly speaking a survey of behavior or opinions. It is only a technical device that con­ sists, in the same forms as political consultation, and toward purely practical ends, in proceeding to a mock-vote some days or weeks before an election in order to anticipate its likely result. Comparison of the pre-electoral poll with the results of voting makes it possible to verify the quality of the setup and the pertinence of the methods by which results are adjusted, with a view to correcting the bias in the adminis­ tration of questionnaires (especially relating to sample biases and the insincerity of responses). Note that such verification is strictly speaking not possible for opinion polls stricto sensu insofar as there is, in this case, no consultation of the whole of the population. To give an idea of the gaps that can separate a mere poll based on a sample of the pop-

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ulation from a national election with the political mobilization that the latter necessarily entails, we need only cite the example of the approval of the Maastricht Treaty, which in 1993, before it had been submitted to a referendum, apparently garnered over 70 percent of favorable opinions as against barely 51 percent of the actual votes a few months later. Thanks to the central position occupied by this grande école in the field of power, Science-Po has gained a preeminent place in the oligopolistic structure that controls the production and media commentary of opinion polls in France, especially through its research center CEFIPOV (Center for the Study of French Political Life). Pierre Bourdieu, “L’opinion publique n’existe pas,” Les Temps mod­ ernes 318 (January 1973): 1292-1309 (as part of the publication of a January 1971 conference held by the Noroit circle in Arras). This article is reprinted in Sociology in Question (London: Sage Publications, 1994 [1980]). Bourdieu returned on four other occasions to the problem of opinion polls and to the question of the production of political opin­ ions: “Les doxosophes,” Minuit 1 (November 1972): 26M5; “Le hit­ parade des intellectuels,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 52/3 (1984): 95-100; Distinction, ch. 4, “Culture and Politics”; “Opinion Polls: A ‘Science’ without a Scientist” (1985), repr. in In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity, 1990 [1987], rev. edn 1994), pp. 168-74; see also Pierre Bourdieu and Patrick Champagne, “L’opinion publique,” in SO Idées qui ébranlèrent le monde, ed. Youri Afanassiev and Marc Ferro (Paris: Payot/Progress, 1989), pp. 204-6. To give an idea of the level on which some French political scientists situated the debate, one need only mention that they accused Bourdieu and myself of being “enemies of public opinion,” of being “against democracy,” in short, of being advocates of totalitarian regimes in which polls are forbidden. On this point, see my “De la doxa à l’orthodoxie politologique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 101/2 (March 1994): 23-4. See, for instance, Susan Herbst, “Surveys in the Public Sphere: Apply­ ing Bourdieu’s Critique of Opinion Polls,” International journal o f Public Opinion Research 4, no. 3 (Autumn 1992): 220-9; James R. Beniger, “The Impact of Polling on Public Opinion: Reconciling Foucault, Habermas, and Bourdieu,” ibid., 204-19; and the literature surveyed in Jeff Manza and Fay Lomax Cook, “A Democratic Polity? Three Views of Policy Responsiveness to Public Opinion in the United States,” American Politics Research 30, no. 6 (November 2002): 630-67. Les Temps modernes is the journal founded by Sartre (along with Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Raymond Aron) at

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the close of World War II; it still enjoyed enormous intellectual and political prestige and a wide non-academic readership in the early seventies (cf. Anna Boschetti, The Intellectual Enterprise: Sartre and Les Temps Modernes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988 [1980]). In the series “Que sais-je?” published by Presses Universitaires de France (a popular yet authoritative book series of short primers gener­ ally written by scholars considered authorities on the topic). On this point, see Patrick Champagne, Faire l'opinion. Le nouveau jeu politique (Paris: Minuit, 1989), esp. ch. 1. See esp. Bourdieu, Distinction, and idem, “What Makes a Social Class? On the Theoretical and Practical Existence of Groups,” Berkeley Journal o f Sociology 32 (1987): 1-18, for a discussion of the notion of social classes; The Love o f Art for a discussion of the idea of culture; and “The Family as Realized Category” (1993), in Practical Reasons: On the Theory o f Action (Cambridge: Polity, 1998 [1994]); for a social history of the invention of the “intellectual,” read Christophe Charle, Naissance de l'intellectuel (Paris: Minuit, 1991). Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and the Genesis of Groups,” Theory & Society 14-16 (November 1985 [1984]): 723-44; repr. in Latiguage and Symbolic Power, pp. 229-51. For a fuller demonstration, see Champagne, Faire l’opinion. A synthetic review of these debates in France can be found in Alain Garrigou, Les Sondages politiques (Paris: La Documentation française, 2004), and Denis Duclos, Les Sondages d'opinion (Paris: Repères, 1996). Patrick Champagne, “Les sondages, le vote et la démocratie,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 109 (October 1995): 73-92. In 1995, the candidate of the Socialist Party, Lionel Jospin, was expected by pre-election polls to place second or even third in the first round due to the general electoral weakness of the Left, but he came out a decisive first, ahead of both leading rightist candidates, while Jacques Chirac, who was predicted to be third, came out second, thus reaching the second round (and eventually winning the presidency). Conversely, in 2002 Jospin (who was then prime minister) was pre­ dicted to place first or second in the first round but found himself in third place and was thus eliminated from the contest, leading to an unexpected and dramatic face-off between incumbent Jacques Chirac and the National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. Bourdieu, “Political Representation: Elements for a Theory of the Polit­ ical Field.” See the illustration provided in the case of post-Soviet Czechoslovakia by Gil Eyal, chapter 8 in this volume. These are snippets of short interviews with random passers-by con­ ducted by radio and television journalists. They aim primarily to illus-

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träte the reaction of the population to a given political measure or event, and they make no claim to being representative of the citizenry. Patrick Champagne, “Le cercle politique: usages sociaux des sondages et nouvel espace politique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 71/2 (March 1988): 71-97.

7 Symbolic Power in the Rule of the “ State Nobility” Loïc Wacquant

Social strata, privileged through existing political, social, and economic orders . . . wish to see their positions transformed from purely factual power relations into a cosmos of acquired rights, and to know that they are thus sanctified. These interests comprise by far the strongest motive for the conservation of charismatic elements of an objectified nature within the structure of domination. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1818-1920)

Let us pose ex abrupto that the central thrust and purpose of Pierre Bourdieu’s work is - and has been since its origin - to “bring back” the symbolic dimension of domination so as to found a generative anthropology of power in its most diverse manifestations. From his early writings on gender relations in his native village of Béarn to his exegesis of the sociopolitical import of Heidegger’s philosophy, from his study of the uprooting of the peasantry of colonial Algeria to his analysis of the role of Flaubert and Manet in the formation of the modern aesthetic gaze, from his critique of the ideological illusions of intellectuals to his investigation of the political construction of the housing market in France and the dissemination of the neoliberal

A first version of this text appeared as “On the Tracks of Symbolic Power: Prefatory Notes to Bourdieu’s ‘State Nobility’,” Theory, Culture & Society, 10, no. 1 (August 1993): 1-17.

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“newspeak” around the globe, the common thread running through Bourdieu’s varied inquiries is to uncover the specific contribution that symbolic forms make to the constitution and perpetuation of struc­ tured inequality by masking its economic and political moorings.

Education and D o m in a tio n in th e D e m o c ra tic A g e

Once we admit that “no domination can maintain itself without making itself recognized by making the arbitrary that is at its basis be misrecognized,”1 Bourdieu’s entire oeuvre may be properly read as a quest to explicate the specificity and potency of symbolic power, that is, the capacity that systems of meaning and signification have of shielding, and thereby strengthening, relations of oppression and exploitation by hiding them under the cloak of nature, benevolence, or meritocracy.2 And his sociology of “culture” then reveals itself for what it is in truth: a political economy o f symbolic violence, of the imposition and inculcation of instruments of knowledge and con­ struction of reality that are socially biased but unseen as such.3 Thus, when the author of Distinction fastens on the cultural products and practices whereby classes differentiate themselves, on the classifica­ tions that define taste in such mundane and diverse matters as sports and sexual mates, foods and furnishings, paintings and politicians, it is because he holds that these classificatory schemata play a critical part in buttressing new forms of class rule by virtue of the hidden correspondence that ties them to the structure of social space.4 Bour­ geois culture is to modern society what religion was to pre-capitalist society, its supreme fetish and, to recall the words of Lukâcs, the “negation of its own soil.” Likewise, if Bourdieu has proved so concerned with academic insti­ tutions, devoting no fewer than five books to the topic and return­ ing to it time and again through three decades of prolific research,5 it is not that he is a sociologist of “education” per se - indeed, he explicitly refutes the accepted division of scientific labor that assigns to scholars the pre-constructed objects of common sense - but because he considers schools to be the preeminent institutional machinery for the certification of social hierarchies in advanced nation-states, and for this very reason a central ground and stake in democratic struggles.6 Again, not unlike the Church in medieval society, the school supplies a sociodicy in action of the existing social order, a rationale for its inequities and the cognitive and moral basis for its conservation:

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Surely, among all the solutions put forth throughout history to the problem of the transmission of power and privileges, there does not exist one that is better concealed, and therefore better adapted to societies which tend to reuse the most patent forms of the hereditary transmission of power and privileges, than that solution which the edu­ cational system provides by contributing to the reproduction of the structure of class relations and by concealing, under an apparently neutral attitude, the fact that it fulfills this function.

Schools, Bourdieu writes in the opening pages of La Noblesse d ’État. Grandes écoles et esprit de corps, his latest and most ambi­ tious effort at unraveling the multistranded connections between academic order and social order, are “one of the foundations of domination and of the legitimation of domination” today, and, con­ sequently, the sociology of education must be understood as “a chapter, and not a lesser one at that, in the sociology of knowledge and in the sociology of power - not to mention the sociology of philosophies of power.”8 Analysis of the elite establishments that groom the (future) members of the dominant class thus takes us right to the heart of the mechanisms of reproduction of their rule. It also leads us onto the site of the conflicts that simultaneously divide and unite the rival fractions of this class and points to the peculiar con­ tradictions that beset the technocratic mode of domination on which their conjoint hegemony rests in the democratic age. Thus The State Nobility is not - or not solely, for it is also that a specialized inquiry into the workings of the upper reaches of the French educational system and its linkages to this country’s bour­ geoisie and leading corporations. It is a study of the web of relations between the social spaces that concentrate the two species of power that the dominant of every complex society have to monopolize in order firmly to found and legitimize their primacy: economic capital and cultural capital. And, for this reason, it offers a powerful model for the historical anthropology of the making and makeup of the ruling class and its differential openness to penetration by and trans­ formation through democratic struggles.9

Dissolving the Dualism of Structure and Agency Bourdieu’s is a political sociology o f symbolic forms that seeks to fuse the insights of Kant and Marx, Cassirer and Weber, Machiavelli and Durkheim, in order to elucidate the logic of symbolic domination while grounding it in the objective distribution of the various forms

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of capital possessed by those who wield it. The distinctive touch of this enterprise is that it does not limit itself to abstract theoretical statements about the “culture-power link” but sets and carries out a detailed program of research or, to be more precise, of construction o f objects. At the top of this agenda is the requirement to circumvent the perennial dualisms that split social-scientific thought and mutilate our grasp of reality: those between subject and object, choice and constraint, consent and coercion, or between the purposive and meaningful activity through which agents construct their world, on the one hand, and the impersonal compulsion and limits that the gravity of social structures imposes upon them, on the other. In The State Nobility, Bourdieu provides perhaps the most accom­ plished exemplar to date of a sociology whose ambition is not simply to combine, articulate, or join structure and agency, but, more fun­ damentally, to dissolve the very distinction between those two seem­ ingly antinomic viewpoints of social analysis by providing an empirical-cum-theoretical demonstration of the simultaneous neces­ sity and inseparability of the “structuralist” and “constructivist” approaches. This is because the true principle of action, Bourdieu sug­ gests, resides in neither of these two “states of the social” that are institutions and agents but in their relation, that is, in the nowharmonious, now-discordant encounter between “history objectified in things,” or structures that have the quasi-reality of things, and “history incarnate in bodies” in the form of the categories of per­ ception and appreciation that individuals engage in their conducts and representations.10 It is out of this perpetual and multi-leveled dialectic of field and habitus, position and disposition, social struc­ tures and mental structures, that practices emerge and (re)make the world that makes them.11 Breaking with classical structuralism, Bourdieu recognizes that the social universe is the result of a work of endless construction. He agrees with phenomenology and ethnomethodology that individuals produce the world about them and that the Lebenswelt is, to recall a felicitous expression of Garfinkel’s, an “ongoing practical achieve­ ment.”12 The structures of society that seem to stand over and against agents as external objects are but the “congealed” outcome of the innumerable acts of cognitive assembly guiding their past and present actions. Against mechanistic forms of analysis that reduce sociology to a mere physics of society, a science of the interplay of reified, dead structures, the concept of habitus reminds us that individuals are not pushed and pulled about by external forces in the manner of lead particles in a magnetic field. Rather, they select and build meaning-

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ful courses of action and thereby actively contribute to determining those very social factors that move them. But to insist on “agency,” as the interpretive and microsociological paradigms rightly demand, in no way implies a negation or diminution of the efficacy of “structure.” For agency is itself socially structured: the acts of classification that guide the choices of indi­ viduals are systematically oriented by the mental and corporeal schemata resulting from the internalization of the objective patterns of their extant social environment. The preferences, habits, and incli­ nations of persons are embodied social structures that transcribe within their organism the organized influences and forces of their milieu. Structural determination is thus lodged at the very heart of agency and is, as it were, indistinguishable from it. What is more, recognizing agency is in no way tantamount to embracing a subjec­ tivist sociology that portrays individuals as intentionally acting either according to the utilitarian teleology of rational-choice theory or in the manner of the semiotic animal dear to the symbolic-interactionist or phenomenological traditions. Donald Davidson has shown that “being intentional” is not “the grammatical litmus of agency.”13 Indeed, argues Bourdieu, the choices that social agents make in their daily lives are “not the intellectual doings of a consciousness, explic­ itly positing its own goals through a deliberate selection between alternatives constituted as such by a project, but the result of the prac­ tical operation of habitus.”14 So much to say that, if the social world is socially constructed, this work of construction unfolds essentially beneath the controls of deliberation and discourse, and obeys a prac­ tical rationality founded in the pre-reflective “social sensitivity”15 that people acquire to the social universes about them by virtue of their durable immersion in them. Competent practice arises not out of rational choice, normative compliance, or situational “ad-hoc-ing,” but out of what Bourdieu, borrowing the terminology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, calls the “ontological complicity,” which varies in degrees and kinds, between the objective structures of the external world and the internal complex of mental and corporeal dispositions that make up the individual’s habitus.16 For Pierre Bourdieu, then, the immanent - as opposed to recon­ structed - logic of practice “defines itself in the relation between habitus, as socially structured biological individualities, and the objective structures inherited from history” that constitute the various fields that together compose a differentiated society.17 It is this relation that sociology must methodically construct anew by dis­ secting its terms as well as by reassembling their encounter in each of the various social games and sites it scrutinizes. This is what Bour-

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dieu does throughout The State Nobility, by constantly shuttling back and forth between the most abstract structures and the most concrete practices and preferences of agents, but with shifting emphases as the analysis unfolds. Put roughly, the first half of the volume, compris­ ing Parts One and Two, concentrates more on the “constructivist” moment: it explicates the social genesis and application of the mental categories that professors and students engage in their practical work of production of the everyday reality of elite schools. The second half elaborates the “structuralist” moment by mapping out the objective configuration, transformation, and mutual linkages between the field of the grandes écoles and the “field of power” - one of Bourdieu’s signal concepts for rethinking the possibilities and limits of demo­ cratic politics in contemporary society.

Classification and C onsecration

In the first part of the book, entitled “Academic Forms of Classifi­ cation,” 18 Bourdieu explores the social and mental structures that command academic judgment and the verdicts rendered by profes­ sors on the intellectual work and qualities of their students. Through a close-up analysis of the results of the concours général (a yearly national competitive examination in which France’s best high-school pupils vie for prizes), the opinions consigned in her grading book by a philosophy teacher at a prestigious Parisian preparatory class to the École normale supérieure (the traditional breeding ground of the country’s high intelligentsia, and Bourdieu’s alma mater), and the obituaries of former professors published in this school’s alumni mag­ azine, Bourdieu uncovers the classificatory activity of which the aca­ demic “elite” is the product, that is, the processes of (self-)selection and co-optation, oriented by a tacit sense of elective affinities based on class upbringing and ethos, through which the students from the various fractions of the bourgeoisie are recognized by their peers and by their teachers as the most “gifted” and deserving of academic preeminence. Bourdieu demonstrates how these apparently scholarly taxonomies in fact permit the passing of transfigured social sentences that are all the more efficacious for not being perceived as such. The “disciplin­ ing of minds” effected by the school proceeds in accordance with a series of homological oppositions (brilliant/dull, distinguished/vulgar, original/common, high/low, etc.) that similarly structures the hierar­ chy of disciplines (from the humanities to the natural sciences) and

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the self-image and scholastic and occupational aspirations that stu­ dents nourish. These oppositions systematically valorize the cultural dispositions of the cultured bourgeoisie, so that a close correlation eventually obtains between the academic hierarchy promulgated by the school and the very social hierarchies from which the latter proclaims its independence. Likewise, the categories of “academic morality” and the space of possible scholastic virtues displayed by professors are arrayed according to a set of dualisms that mirror the opposition between the bourgeoisie and the lower classes, on the one hand, and between the intellectual and business fractions of the upper class, on the other. All in all, the school system functions in the manner of “an immense cognitive machine” that affects operations of grading and ranking which, “though they are endowed with all appearances of neutrality, reproduce preexisting social classifica­ tions” and thereby stamp them with the seal of approval of the state. 1 9 In the second part of this constructivist moment, entitled “The Ordination” (in deliberate reference to religion), Bourdieu analyzes the training of students in the preparatory classes that lead to elite schools - what he labels “the production of a nobility.” Preparatory classes are special two- to four-year programs which, as their name indicates, train the top graduates of the French secondary education system for the entrance examinations to the various grandes écoles. These classes function in the manner of total institutions designed to thoroughly transform the mind, body, and self of students in con­ formity with the anticipated requirements of elite schools and the various positions of power to which these lead. They have their own temporal and spatial organization, distinct from that of the regular university cursus, and they subject their students to harrowing work schedules, with upwards of 40 hours of weekly coursework requir­ ing an equal amount of personal study punctuated by incessant oral and written testing. Such relentless competitive pressure is designed not only to isolate students from their families but also, and most importantly, to set them apart from the rest of their age cohort, espe­ cially students who follow the much less prestigious university route. The “selective internment” effected by the prépas produces a socially and mentally homogeneous group whose very homogeneity rein­ forces mutual (re)socialization and the closure of social capital, thereby limiting chances of misalliances and laying the groundwork for future patterns of class-wide coordination and cooperation. The intensive and segregative socialization dispensed by these preparatory classes also gives birth to the esprit de corps specific to the contemporary ruling class and conducive to its ideological inte-

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gration in spite of its potential or actual divisions (hence the subtitle of Bourdieu’s book in French), that is, “this feeling of group soli­ darity” stemming from the “communality of schemata of perception, appreciation, thought, and action that found the unthinking con­ nivance of a set of well-orchestrated unconscious.”20 The fundamen­ tal significance of the pedagogy of preparatory classes lies less in its message than in its medium, which separates their “pupils” (members of, and candidates to, the grandes écoles are called élèves and not étudiants) from run-of-the-mill students and instills in them a dis­ tinctive relation to culture that stresses public mastery of self as a prelude and condition of rulership over others. The rigorous ascesis required of prépas students has every charac­ teristic of a charismatic initiation endowed with what Nelson Goodman calls “world-making power,”21 that is, the ability to produce the reality it claims merely to record. The efficacy of this col­ lective self-fulfilling prophecy is explained not only by the fact that, having selected those youths that are the most predisposed to adhere to their dictates and values, such schools preach mostly to the con­ verted. It is due also to their capacity to imbue even their most rebel­ lious students with a sense of dignity and noblesse oblige that leads them to embrace the credo of the meritocratic legitimacy of their privilege and to identify with their defense, even when these privi­ leges will not in fact be granted them: The institution of the school nobility, as a group that collective belief designates for exceptional fates, has the effect of constituting such exceptional fates. . . . The academic act of consecration puts into the same juridical class, designated and constituted by the credential, indi­ viduals who in fact constitute a statistical class, defined as such by a certain dispersion. It thereby leads the totality of the elected to expect of themselves accomplishments that are only guaranteed to a small fraction of the class.. . . Moreover, the very fact of belonging to a group to which the possibility of the highest distinctions is generically offered allows one to partake of these distinctions, both objectively and subjectively or, more precisely, to share in the symbolic capital ensured to the group as a whole by the totality of the scarce proper­ ties accumulated by the totality of its members, and particularly by the most prestigious of them.22

P ow er as an E ffect o f S tru c tu ra l H o m o lo g ie s

Having laid bare the intimate connection between the order of classes and academic classifications as well as the process of consecration of

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I4 I

the electii, Bourdieu turns to the two social spaces in which the stu­ dents and graduates of elite schools evolve, the field of grandes écoles and the field of power, and he devotes the last three parts of The State Nobility to a synchronic and diachronic analysis of their structure, change, and interrelations. Here Bourdieu breaks with the monographic cast of conventional studies of elite schools. Arguing that the most distinctive properties of any establishment can be detected only by first locating it in the overall constellation they collectively form, he begins by drawing a social topology of the grandes écoles. A factorial analysis of corre­ spondences among the characteristics of the student body of the 84 institutions surveyed turns up two striking homologies between the structure of the space of elite schools and the class structure. First, the opposition between major and minor schools mirrors the oppo­ sition in social space between the haute bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie. Second, the dualism between “intellectual” schools (such as the École normale supérieure) and schools geared to the exercise of political-economic power (such as the École des hautes études com­ merciales, France’s leading graduate business school) reproduces the polar antagonism between the two fractions of the dominant class, namely, the cultural and the economic bourgeoisie. What accounts for these homologies? Bourdieu’s answer is again to unravel the dialectic of mental and social structures. Because they have internal­ ized categories of judgment that are patterned after these social oppo­ sitions, students tend to gravitate towards those schools that reward the type of sociocultural dispositions they have acquired from their family and which are best fitted to the kind of positions of power to which each of these different schools gives access in turn. This cor­ respondence expresses itself also between the structure of the posi­ tions that students occupy in the space of schools (and the trajectories that have led them there) and the preferences and stances they adopt in a variety of domains, from cultural consumption and politics to religion and hobbies. Thus, for instance, students of the École normale supérieure, being wedded to the intellectual pole of the space of schools and destined for the intellectual fractions of the dominant class, generally dislike sports but are avid amateurs of theater and opera; they read more dailies and scholarly journals and are politi­ cally well to the left of their counterparts at the École des HEC, who typically put sporting activities above intellectual ones, while students from the ENA (École nationale d’administration, a postgraduate establishment preparing for the higher reaches of the civil service) stand somewhere in between. This is because “ethical, aesthetic, and political ‘choices’ find their basis in the matrix o f preferences

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resulting from the incorporation of the structure of the capital inherited.”23 But the mechanisms of reproduction at work here are only statis­ tical. While they systematically skew probabilities of academic success along a class gradient, they preclude neither (limited) down­ ward mobility, and thus disillusionment and dissent among those who fail to preserve their eminent position, nor those “criss-crossing tra­ jectories” at the end of which the daughters of university professors enter business schools and the sons of corporate executives elect to become philosophers. Indeed, Bourdieu contends that such “deviant trajectories are one of the most important factors in the transforma­ tion of the field of power” because they produce unstable disposi­ tions that in turn generate contradictory, if not reactional, practices and stances, especially in the realm of politics:24 vide the extreme leftism of many students of bourgeois background in the sixties in Europe and America. Bourdieu’s most important finding, however, is that the space of the grandes écoles is itself linked to the overall space of positions of power by yet another relation of homology. The various fields in which the diverse forms of capital monopolized by the bourgeoisie circulate - namely, the economic field, the field of higher civil service, the university field, and the artistic field - are arrayed according to the objective hierarchy between the two dominant forms of power in contention, economic power and cultural power.25 So that the same chiasmatic structure organizes social space, the field of elite schools, and the field of power (and the contemporary bourgeoisie itself): in each, the distribution according to “the dominant principle of dom­ ination” (economic capital) stands in inverse symmetry to the distri­ bution according to the “dominated principle of domination” (cultural capital), as indicated in figure 7.1. There is no room here even to adumbrate Bourdieu’s subsequent analysis, based on an impressive array of data on the 200 leading French corporations and their chief executive officers, of the internal makeup of the business segment of the bourgeoisie26 and of the man­ ifold strategies they develop to reconvert and preserve their capital as well as to rebuff the claims of the holders of credentials for a greater share of the spoils of domination. Nor is it possible to do justice to the intricacies of his explication of the two modes of repro­ duction that today’s state nobility combines to perpetuate its rule. Suffice it to say that the first, direct reproduction, is based on the unmediated transmission of private property via the family, whereas in the second, school-based reproduction, inheritance of power and

SYMBOLIC POWER A N D “ STATE N O B I L I T Y ”

cultural capital +

143

cultural capital -

economic capital -

economic capital +

S O C IA L S P A C E

“artist”

“bourgeois”

scientists

professions

business(men)

F IE L D O F P O W E R

artistic — scientific — academic - bureaucratic field — juridical — economic field (government)

F IE L D O F E LITE S C H O O L S

“intellectual schools” école normale supérieure

“political-economic schools” ENA, Science-po

HEC

Figure 7.1 Structural homologies between social space, the field of power, and the field of elite schools.

privilege is mediated by educational institutions acting as screen and warrant of preeminence according to the “democratic” trope of merit.27 The specificity of the latter lies in its stochastic logic: while it allows the class as a collective to reproduce itself, it does not guar­ antee that this or that one of its members will be able to preserve his position. The specific contradiction of this mechanism of reproduc­ tion resides thus in the disjuncture it creates between the interest of the class that the school safeguards and the individual interest of those offspring of the class whom it must sacrifice as a price for the

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added profit of legitimation guaranteed by the lengthening of the chain of consecration and the much greater opacity of the process of reproduction. Another striking finding of this investigation is the extraordinary resilience of the structures of power in France. Despite the rapid pro­ liferation of smaller professional schools (especially in management) and a general increase in educational attendance and competition, the shape of the field of grandes écoles remained virtually unchanged over the two decades after 1966. If anything, the schisms between presti­ gious and lowly establishments, on the one hand, and between the university and the grandes écoles, on the other, have both deepened, contributing to the increased elitism of the latter. As for the corpo­ rate bourgeoisie, the relative increase of the weight of cultural capital (and especially of degrees certifying a general, bureaucratic culture as opposed to credentials testifying to technical or scientific competence) in strategies of reproduction has eroded but certainly not annulled the ability of economic capital to reproduce itself autonomously. Indeed, Bourdieu stresses that the tendency for the school-mediated mode of reproduction to supplant the direct mode is in no way a nec­ essary and irreversible evolution: rather, it is the contingent outcome of a political battle that locks the various fractions of the bourgeoisie for “domination over the economic field through the mediation of the annexation of the state.”28 For students of democratic politics, the analyses contained in The State Nobility make it abundantly clear that Bourdieu rejects both the centralist, top-down vision of power as located in an apparatus (à la Althusser) capable of mechanically imposing its own logic on people and the “spontaneist” or decentralized conception of power as arising from below and dispersed throughout the “networks” that make up a society found in the works of Michel Foucault and of the analysts of unconventional politics he has inspired. Bourdieu does share with Foucault the view that power is not a substance that indi­ viduals or groups possess but an effect of certain social relations inscribed in the very constitution of the subjects who exercise and suffer it.29 He concurs in the idea that power takes a multiplicity of forms (viz. the different species of capital) that may, under definite conditions that social analysis can specify, activate an equally varied gamut of strategies of resistance, recalcitrance, or self-preservation. Indeed, it is the very differentiation of “forms of capital,” and the corresponding emergence of social microcosms and mechanisms devoted to their separate accumulation and preservation, that required forging the notion of “field of power.”30 Bourdieu likewise agrees with Foucault that the wielding of power does not necessitate

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conscious intention and explicit decision making and that power is not merely repressive but also “productive” of new relations and real­ ities. Yet the two French social theorists part on at least two major counts. First, Bourdieu maintains that, far from being diffused throughout the social in the form of “capillaries,” power is concentrated in definite institutional sectors and in given zones of social space: the field of power is precisely this arena where the “social energy” con­ stitutive of forms of capital accumulates and where the relative value of diverse species of power is contested and adjudicated. Rather than an “ascending analysis of power starting from its infinitesimal mech­ anisms,”31 Bourdieu gives priority to a focused analysis of the nexus of institutions that ensures the reproduction of economic and cultural capital via the apparently anarchic actions and reactions of a multi­ tude of agents who simultaneously compete and collude in the operation of ever-longer and more complex circuits of legitimation ultimately vouchsafed by the state as the arbiter of the conflicts between contending capitals. A second major difference between Bourdieu and Foucault is that, unlike savoir-pouvoir, symbolic vio­ lence does not presuppose the mediation of “discourse” or formal­ ized bodies of knowledge implying claims to truth, as in Foucault’s analysis of “bio-power” in the rise of the disciplinary society.32 It operates, rather, by way of the inculcation of mental categories that, being adjusted to the objective world out of which they have issued, make effects of power possible by rendering them imperceptible: [Agents] unwittingly contribute to wielding the symbolic domination that is wielded upon them, that is upon their unconscious, inasmuch as - and only inasmuch as - their mental structures are objectively in agreement with the social microcosm in which their specific interests are engendered and invested, in and through that very agreement.33

For the “triangle: power, right, truth” dear to Foucault, Bourdieu substitutes the triangle power-body-belief.™ In the end, the hegemony of today’s bourgeoisie is supported by the whole pyramid of criss­ crossing and mutually reinforcing homologies that connect a web of structures, objective and subjective, out of which ultimately arises the belief, sanctified by the state and shared both by the dominant and by the dominated, in the necessity and legitimacy of its rule. Each of the four parts of The State Nobility - on the social roots of academic schemata of judgment, the process of production of a consecrated academic elite, the form and evolution of the space of elite schools, the structure and modification of the capitalist class and

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of its ties to these schools and to the state - may be read separately with considerable profit by scholars interested in the relation between democracy, on the one hand, and education, class, culture, formal organizations, and economic and political command, on the other.35 Yet it is only when they are brought and thought together that their analytic significance and impact are fully felt. For it is the intricate network of genetic, structural, and functional linkages between each of these aspects of technocratic rule that provides the clearest view of the object Bourdieu has sought to construct, as well as the fullest vantage point from which to evaluate both the method he employs for this purpose and the explanation put forth for what he calls the “state magic” of credentials in purportedly rationalized societies. The State Nobility does not give adequate answers to all the questions it raises, nor solutions to all the puzzles it unearths. But it offers a set of powerful analytical tools and a bold provisional model for the comparative and historical analysis of the “ruling classes” of differ­ ent epochs that is particularly apposite for probing how class domi­ nation operates in liberal societies smitten with the democratic ideals of formal equality and individual merit.' It is not by happenstance that La Noblesse d’État was published in early 1989 (and opens with an epigrammatic quote dated 1789), just as the country’s establishment was readying itself for the national festivities in honor of the French Revolution. The book was Bourdieu’s personal contribution to the bicentennial, one at once icono­ clastic and truthful to the originary ideals of 1789. By exposing the collective (self-)mystification that undergirds its power at the very moment when it is being publicly celebrated, Bourdieu’s hope was, if not to contribute to the “process of dissolution within the ruling class” of which Marx spoke in The Communist Manifesto, at least to register a note of dissent in the concert of congratulation orches­ trated by the new (Socialist-led) state nobility of France strident enough to “compel the truth of power relations to come into the open, if only by forcing them to veil themselves yet further.”36

Notes 1

2

Pierre Bourdieu and Monique de Saint Martin, “Le patronat,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 20/1 (March-April 1978): 3-82, at 76. All translations from Bourdieu’s texts are mine. “Symbolic power, a subordinate form of power, is a transfigured, that is to say, misrecognizable, transformed and legitimated form of other kinds of power. A unified science of practice(s) must transcend the

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3

4 5

6

7 8 9

I 47

forced choice between sterile energetic models that describe social rela­ tions as power relations, and cybernetic models that see them as rela­ tions of communication. Such a science must describe the laws of transformation that govern the transmutation of different kinds of capital into symbolic capital” (Pierre Bourdieu, “Symbolic Power,” in Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity, 1990 [this essay 1977]), p. 70). Loïc Wacquant, “From Ideology to Symbolic Violence: Culture, Class, and Consciousness in Marx and Bourdieu,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 30, no. 2 (October 1993): 125-42. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique o f the Judgment o f Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984 [1979]), pp. 466-84. In order of original publication, they are Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, The Inheritors: French Students and their Relation to Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979 [1964]); Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passeron, Monique de Saint Martin et ah, Acadetnic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professional Power (Cambridge: Polity, 1992 [1965]); Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London: Sage, 1977 [1970]); Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Cambridge: Polity, 1988 [1984J), and The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field o f Power (Cambridge: Polity, 1996 [1989]). Seven issues of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, the journal Bourdieu founded and edited at the Center for European Sociology, the research group he directed in Paris, were devoted to education between 1975 and 1990. This was perceptively noted over two decades ago by Collins: “Bour­ dieu is more than a sociologist of education. Education is only a strate­ gic site for his argument” (Randall Collins, “Cultural Capitalism and Symbolic Violence,” in his Sociology since Mid-Century: Essays in Theory Cumulation (New York: Academic Press, 1981), pp. 173-82, at p. 174). It is fully documented empirically by Franck Poupeau’s searching sociology of the sociology of education in France in the past four decades pinpointing Bourdieu’s distinctive location within it, Une Sociologie d ’État. L’école et ses experts en France (Paris: Raisons d’agir Éditions, 2003). Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, p. 178 (trans. modified). Pierre Bourdieu, The State Nobility, p. 5. The full original title of the book in French is La Noblesse d’État. Grandes écoles et esprit de corps. I discuss this point at length in my Foreword to The State Nobility, pp. ix-xii, in which I also adumbrate the transposition between French and American elite schools to show the applicability of Bourdieu’s notion of “field of power” beyond its empirical setting of conception; see also Gil Eyal’s chapter in this book (chapter 8).

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12 13 14 15 16

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Pierre Bourdieu, Leçon sur la leçon (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1982), p. 38; trans. as “Lecture on the Lecture,” in In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity, 1990 [1987], rev. edn 1994), pp. 177-98, at 190-1). The dialectic of “social structures and mental structures” is set out in compressed form in the pages of the “Prologue” to The State Nobility, pp. 1-6, which are among the most lucid and cogent ever written by Bourdieu. Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967). Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 44. Bourdieu, The State Nobility, p. 2. James Ostrow, Social Sensitivity (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989). Thus Axel Honneth could not be further from the truth when he inter­ prets Bourdieu’s analysis of practice as a “utilitarian transformation of anthropological structuralism . . . which analytically puts symbolic practices on the same level as economiq.practices,” as “social activities performed from the point of view of utility maximization” (“The Fragmented World of Symbolic Forms: Reflections on Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture,” Theory, Culture & Society 3 (1986): 55-66, at 56). For explicit refutations of this “neo-classical” reading of Bourdieu’s theory of practical sense, see Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words, pp. 34-57, 87-93, 194-6, and idem. The Logic o f Practice (Cambridge: Polity, 1990 [1980]), book I, esp. pp. 42-65. Bourdieu, The State Nobility, p. 53. Also: “We find here the most obscure principle of action, which resides neither in structures nor in consciousness but in the relation of unmediated proximity between objective structures and embodied structures” (ibid., p. 38, trans. modified). A transparent allusion to the classic essay by Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss on Primitive Forms o f Classification, ed. Rodney Needham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963 [1903]), which first formulated the idea, central to all of Bourdieu’s theories, of a correspondence between social structures and mental structures (The State Nobility, pp. 1-6). The affiliation is not merely a homage to the founder of modern French sociology and his nephew or a way of sig­ naling the Durkheimian roots of Bourdieu’s problematic: it is also sub­ stantive, for Bourdieu believes that the social function of “logical integration” played by totemic classification in segmentary social for­ mations is played by academic taxonomies and credentials in advanced societies. Bourdieu, The State Nobility, p. 52. Ibid., p. 85.

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Nelson Goodman, Ways o f World-Making (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978). Bourdieu, The State Nobility, pp. 113-14. Ibid., pp. 170-1. Ibid., p. 183. Bourdieu suggests also that the structure of each of these Helds is itself organized in a manner homologous to that of the field of power as a whole, and that each owes a number of its most specific properties to the position it occupies within the latter. For a demonstration in the case of the university field, see Bourdieu, Homo Academicus. Briefly, two main oppositions structure the field of economic power. The first pits patrons d ’Etat (i.e., corporate leaders who, having gone to the top elite schools, owe their career and power to their links to the state and promote a “modernized,” technocratic vision of the firm) and patrons privés (the heirs of the great commercial, financial, and indus­ trial dynasties of the country, more often based in the provinces, lacking in credentials and wedded to a paternalistic if not autocratic concep­ tion of management). The second opposes the “business nobility” (old corporate lineages descended from the nobility and the Parisian high bourgeoisie) and the “late comers” who have only recently risen into the dominant class. Bourdieu shows that these dualisms underlay a whole series of systemic differentiations among capitalists and in particular differences in their mix of strategies of reproduction and legitimation. This model is further elaborated and generalized in Pierre Bourdieu, “Stratégies de reproduction et modes de domination,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 105 (December 1994): 3-12. Bourdieu, The State Nobility, p. 322. This line of analysis is extended in Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reasons: On the Theory o f Action (Cam­ bridge: Polity, 1998 [1994]), esp. chs 2 and 3: “The New Capital” (orig. 1989) and “Rethinking the State: On the Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field” (orig. 1990). Compare Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 78-108, with, for instance, Bourdieu, The State Nobility, pp. 102-23, and idem, Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity, 2000 [1997]), ch. 6. Cf. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, “From Ruling Class to Field of Power,” Theory, Culture & Society 10, no. 1 (August 1993): 19-44, and Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology o f Education, ed. John G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1983), pp. 241-58. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 99. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977 [19751), and idem, A History o f Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978 [1976]). For Bourdieu,

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such knowledges are crucial ingredients not in the production of sub­ altern subjects (the mad, the ill, the criminal, etc.) but in the produc­ tion of the state apparatus, its agencies, functionaries, and missions (Pierre Bourdieu, Olivier Christin, and Pierre-Étienne Will, “Sur la science de l’État,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 113 (June 2000): 3-12). Bourdieu, The State Nobility, p. 4. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 93; see esp. Bourdieu, The Logic o f Practice, chs 4, 7, and 8, and idem, Pascalian Meditations, ch. 4. Thus, contrary to Lash’s assertion, it is clear that Bourdieu does not at all share the “postmodern-type power/knowledge assumptions of Fou­ cault” (Scott Lash, “Modernization and Postmodernization in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu,” in his Sociology o f Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 237-65, at p. 254). For selected contrasts and convergences with research in each of these areas roughly contemporaneous with the publication of La Noblesse d ’État, see, respectively, Fritz Ringer, Fields o f Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective, 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ,1992), and Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel, The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise o f Educational Opportunity in America, 1950-1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), on the culture and politics of tertiary education in Europe and the United States; Maurice Zeitlin, The Large Corporation and Contemporary Classes (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), and George E. Marcus, Lives in Trust: The Fortunes o f Dynastic Families in Late 20th-Century America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991 ), on the making of the American ruling class; Lawrence W. Levine, High-Brow/Low-Brow: The Emergence o f Cul­ tural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), on the historical process of sacralization of “high-brow” culture; Walter W. Powell and Paul DiMaggio, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), on organizational analysis; Neil Fligstein, The Transformation o f Corporate Control (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), on the historical relations between US corporate forms and the state; and Paul Corrigan and David Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as a Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), and Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), on the symbolic dimension of state and civic formation. This is my retranslation of the concluding lines of the preface to Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, p. xxi.

8 The Making and Breaking of the Czechoslovak Political Field Gil Eyal

On 1 January 1993, the Czechoslovak federation ceased to exist. It was obvious to most observers at the time that the proximate cause for the breakup was not popular disenchantment with the federation, but a political struggle between Czech and Slovak elites. In this chapter, I would like to deploy Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the political field in order to explain this “paradox of a state that dis­ integrated even though the majority of its citizens favored its continuance.”1 My argument, in brief, is that the struggle in the political field was a theatricalized representation of the conflicts of post-Communist society, conflicts that in Poland and Hungary, for example, led to the return of post-Communist parties to power in 1994. Thus the breakup was neither the result of popular national­ ist sentiment nor simply a cynical elite power play but, rather, it was caused by the polarized manner in which social and class conflicts were transposed from social space onto the political field. In the first part of this chapter, I elucidate Bourdieu’s concept of political field and adapt it for the purpose of analyzing postCommunist politics. The main point will be that this concept prompts us to think how the various oppositions operative in social space are mapped onto a set of political relations that may reflect, invert, con­ dense, or polarize them. In the second part, I analyze the making of the Czechoslovak post-Communist political field, focusing in partic­ ular on the round-table negotiations between the regime and the opposition in 1989. The central argument will be that social conflicts

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were projected onto the political field in a condensed form, especially because the round-table negotiations endowed one faction - the dissidents - with a monopoly over symbolic capital. Consequently, to become legitimate participants in the emerging political field, all other factions had to remain linked in some way to the dissidents. It follows that at that point in time the breakup of Czechoslovakia was not inevitable. In the third part of the chapter, I analyze the process of polariza­ tion of the political field as the formation of a distinct opposition between a Czech right-wing ideological package and a Slovak leftwing ideological package. The contention will be that these two pack­ ages were assembled with respect both to considerations of electoral strategy and to the oppositions current in the space of discursive strategies. The key political actors identified their internal (i.e., within each republic) enemies and selected the proper strategies to defeat them, in accordance with ideological tastes derived from their posi­ tions in the space of discursive strategies. This meant, however, that they were pushed further and further apart from each other, a process of political polarization that evéntually ‘ushered in the split between the Czech and the Slovak republics.

Towards a T h e o ry o f P o s t-C o m m u n is t Politics The concept o f the political field

Bourdieu’s concept of “political field” endeavors to synthesize some of the major insights but also overcome the false polarities of politi­ cal sociology. In particular, it is meant to incorporate the notion that political actors represent social interests, and quite often class inter­ ests constituted in the economic arena. At the same time, however, the concept enters the two routine qualifications of this proposition: (i) that political ideologies are not mere reflections of the social bases of political action but exert an independent effect; and (ii) that in the age of “catch-all” parties, the political game has acquired relative autonomy from either ideological or social determinants, so that the identity of political actors may reflect nothing but their “naked” opposition in the electoral market.2 To begin with, the concept of field, is designed to overcome the polarity between “internalist” and “externalist” principles of expia-

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nation.3 Bourdieu suggests that we think of political platforms as positions in a space of relations and that an inventory of the rela­ tions intersecting at this position is tantamount to a description of the political platform. Bourdieu also proposes that we think of these relations as relations of force structured by active properties or capitals; this means that a summary of the weight of the different types of capital attached to a certain position is again tantamount to a description of the platform, and that this summary already expresses what used to be analyzed as the “autonomy” and “heteronomy” of political actors. From this point of view, it is a truism that political action is determined by the opposition between politi­ cal actors in the electoral market, and only to a lesser extent by the representation of social interests. At the same time, it is also true that such oppositions are not “nakedly” political, since within them are already encoded the external effects of determination by the social space. Put differently, the proposition according to which political actors represent social interests does not necessarily mean that a given political actor represents a given social interest; this is but a specific case of a more general relation that obtains between structures. It is the play of differences and similarities between social interests in social space that is represented by the total structure o f relations within the political field, and since political actors take this structure into consideration in their action, even “nakedly” political action is determined by a relation of representation. The other significant contribution that Bourdieu makes to politi­ cal analysis is his reworking of the relation of political representation as constitutive, as encapsulated by the concept of symbolic poiver. Symbolic power is the power to impose legitimate divisions within a social space, thereby making groups or classes “seeable and believ­ able.” Political representation is not a simple relation of delegation between a group and a representative, but a complex act of naming through which what is represented is thereby made real. Thus polit­ ical ideologies do not simply “reflect” the social bases of political action - if anything, the opposite is true: political struggle is precisely a fight over the capacity to impose a legitimate vision of social space and its relation to the political field, i.e., to convert political capital (control over the instruments of political representation) into sym­ bolic power (the prestige of being the effective “delegate” of a social group). The political struggle, which determines the capacity to impose representations, is itself neither autonomous nor a social struggle in disguise, but a “theatricalized representation” of the strug­ gles in social space.4

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Thus a heuristic model of the political field would represent it as structured by two oppositions: one “external,” in the sense that it reflects the distribution of capitals in social space, the other “inter­ nal,” in the sense that social and ideological distinctions are trans­ formed into the specific idiom of the political field - what Karl Schmitt called “the friend/enemy distinction”5 - and become an opposition between “right” and “left.” The opposition between “right” and “left” should be treated almost as a spatial dualism, as to be “right-wing” is to associate with others occupying that loca­ tion and combating those who are at the opposite pole. Nonetheless, the content of the ideological packages that constitute the “left” and “right” poles of the political field is also determined by the opposi­ tions and affinities current in the space of discursive strategies, which influence how politicians recognize their allies and adversaries.6 Bourdieu’s approach underscores the need to think about the rela­ tion between the political field and social space as a variable. Instead of being limited to hypotheses about how unique political actors represent given social interests, field analysis formulates hypotheses about how the oppositions and'similarities between social interests are transposed onto the plane of political actors and their struggles. I use the term “transposition” here in the geometric sense, as a trans­ formation of objects that conserves relations while changing their size or orientation. As a result of the representations produced and imposed by political actors, and as a result of the balance of power between them, the antagonisms and affinities between social inter­ ests, while always conserved within the structure of the political field, may be represented more or less openly, more or less directly. A sim­ plified classification of such transpositions would include at least these four: reflection, inversion, condensation, and polarization. Reflection stands for the traditional hypothesis of political sociology, according to which each party represents the interests of a given social group or class. In the ideal-typical case, this would mean that the opposition between “left” and “right” would represent the oppo­ sition between the upper and lower regions of social space. Inversion means that the political field is an “upside-down” representation of the social relations of domination. For example, those who hold the dominated positions in social space, together with those who hold the dominated position within the dominant class, constitute the gov­ erning party at the “left” pole of the field. Condensation implies that certain social antagonisms are obscured by becoming lodged inside a party. Finally, polarization refers here to the fact that certain social antagonisms are pushed outside the political game because the field has fragmented along ethnic or regional lines.

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The post-Communist political field Figure 8.1 presents a roughly drawn diagram of the post-Communist political field and its interrelations with social space and the space of discursive strategies summing up this conceptual reading. The post-Communist political field is structured, first, by the opposition between those who have large quantities of cultural capital (intellec­ tuals, technocrats, professionals) and those who have large quan­ tities of political capital (party cadres); i.e., the opposition in the field of power between the different fractions of the dominant class. Any theory of post-Communist politics must begin from the transforma­ tion of the field of power ushered in by the demise of the Commu­ nist regimes. With the end of the power monopoly of the Communist Party, the relative value of the various capitals has been inverted: political capital amassed by the cadres was de-legitimated and de­ institutionalized, while cultural capital in the hands of technocrats and intellectuals was valorized.7 On the other hand, the post-Communist political field is also struc­ tured by the specifically political opposition between “right” and “left.” The content of the ideological packages that constitute this polarity is determined at least in part by the oppositions in the space of discursive strategies, in particular by the struggle over the signifi­ cance of the Communist past. Any theory of post-Communist poli­ tics must take full account of the development of this space during late communism. From 1968 onwards, it became increasingly organ­ ized as a set of alternative responses to the demise of the prototypi­ cal social role of the intellectuals in Soviet-style society - the teleological redistributor. On the one side, there was the strategy that sought to save the teleological claim to predict and plan by forgoing transcendence and locating intellectuals within society as one of its immanent agencies of self-regulation. “Reform communism” was precisely about this kind of bargain. On the other side, there was a strategy that opted for a radical rejection of teleology, but at the same time placed intellectuals outside society, as its transcendent pastors. Dissidence and “anti-politics” were typical expressions of this route. With the fall of communism, these discursive strategies became opposed as the affirmation and rejection of the Communist past. The greatest symbolic profits could be reaped, not by making teleological claims about the future, but by managing to impose one’s interpre­ tation of the past. Thus the dissidents denounced the Communist past wholesale, while the reform Communists emphasized its merits, however limited, and looked to synthesize its achievements with

Y\%uxt %A AV post-Commumst political field

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Western models of democracy. In the debate about economic policy, this translated into the opposition between the monetarist call for an immediate transition to a “market with no adjectives,” on the one side, and the reform Communist advocacy of gradualism and a “mixed economy,” on the other. An additional opposition that struc­ tured ideological packages pitted “conservatives” and “liberals,” i.e., advocates of family, religion, order, and the nation, versus advocates of universal human rights.8 The transposition of social interests into the post-Communist politi­ cal field took several different forms: in the early days of the transfor­ mation, social interests were usually condensed into large umbrella movements, such as the Czech Civic Forum (OF) and the Slovak Public against Violence (VPN). While generally excluding former party cadres from their midst, these movements comprised reform Communists and dissidents, liberals and conservatives, and captured the majority of votes from all classes. Latent social and ideological antagonisms, however, tended to fragment them. One of the most common results was the emergence of a “right” party of intellectuals and technocrats representing the intelligentsia and the entrepreneurs, and a “left” party of cadres representing workers and other “losers” of the post-Soviet economic transformation. These “left” parties were typically succes­ sors of the old Communist parties, but they were able to remake them­ selves and win elections to the extent that they managed to win the additional support of reform technocrats and managers. A condition of their electoral success, then, was a condensation transposition that overcame (at least for a short while) the opposition between tech­ nocrats and cadres in the field of power, and the opposition between managers and workers in social space. To anticipate and simplify the argument somewhat, let me note that the most successful parties in the 1992 Czechoslovak elections were, in Slovakia, a party of managers and cadres (HZDS) repre­ senting the workers and, in the Czech Republic, a party of tech­ nocrats and intellectuals (ODS) representing the intelligentsia and the entrepreneurs. The result was thus a polarized transposition. In terms of the formation of post-Communist ideological packages there were again various possibilities, depending on the strategic situation. As we shall see, if the “right” ideological package formed on the basis of a rejection of the past, while right-wing parties remained torn between liberals and conservatives, then, owing to the logic of bipolar opposition, it becomes a reasonable strategy for “left” parties to turn conservative and emphasize authority and the nation so as to forge a “social-nationalist” ideological package and thus undermine the right coalition.

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T h e Round-Table N e g o tia tio n s and th e 1990 Elections

The inaugural moment of the post-Communist field in most East European countries came with the round-table negotiations between the opposition and the regime. Before that, politics were conducted in two parallel but separate spheres - the party and the samizdat with only incidental exchanges between them. Once the regime was forced to invite the representatives of the opposition to open consul­ tations, there began a process of unifying the competition not only for political power, but most importantly also for symbolic power, the prestige of delegation. In effect, the party conceded its monopoly over delegation and a competition began over who were the legiti­ mate members of the “opposition,” because such membership con­ ferred instant symbolic capital as the legitimate voices of “society.” The most significant fact about the round-table negotiations in Czechoslovakia was that they \vere organized and forced on the regime by Czech dissidents. In Hungary, by comparison, a strong reformist faction within the Communist Party organized the round­ table negotiations. Accordingly, the negotiations in Czechoslovakia pitted an opposition delegation, composed almost completely of dis­ sidents, in direct confrontation with the regime’s delegation, while in Hungary they were three-way negotiations between the dissidents, the reform Communist faction, and the hard-line Communist faction. This meant that, unlike in Hungary, it was relatively easy for the Czech dissidents to claim that they, and they only, were the legitimate delegates of “the people.” This also meant that the decisive factor according to which post-Communist political reputations were to be made and/or broken in the Czech Republic was proximity to or distance from the dissidents. For example, Communist officials like Marian Calfa, who managed to strike bargains with the dissidents, rose meteorically to power after the negotiations and were able later to convert their political capital into economic fortune. Others, like Ladislav Adamec, who could not find a common language with them, were swiftly removed from the political scene.9 But the dissidents’ monopoly over the symbolic capital of legiti­ mate delegation was challenged in several ways, and they had to fight hard in order to preserve it. First, pretending to seek “balance” and a more complete representation of society, the government insisted on inviting to the round table all sorts of “independent” figures from “satellite” parties or mass organizations. The dissidents demanded, and eventually forced the issue, that the so-called independents be

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part of the regime’s delegation, and not a “third” pole. Second, and more significantly, in the course of the negotiations the dissidents dis­ covered that a group of reform Communists from the socialist oppo­ sition going by the name of Obroda (“Revival”) were conducting a parallel set of negotiations with the regime. Suspecting that this was a ploy to split the opposition, the dissidents reacted angrily and refused to include Obroda members in the new “government of national reconciliation.” Exasperated, they declared that the reform Communists were perhaps worthy of rehabilitation but utterly inca­ pable of holding key positions in the present conjuncture, since they were “insiders” and “symbols of 1968.” Put differently, to maintain their monopoly over symbolic political capital, the dissidents devel­ oped a discursive strategy involving a complete rejection of the Communist past such that anybody associated with it, even as a reformer or a critic, was immediately suspect - not suspecting that this argument would soon come back to haunt them. Finally, and more significantly, throughout the round-table negotiations the dissi­ dents were reminded over and over again that their group was com­ posed mostly of Czechs, and that Slovaks must be granted parity in the opposition delegation and the government. The dissidents found a ready ally in the few Slovak dissidents belonging to the Slovak opposition movement, VPN, who joined in the negotiations, but they were uncomfortable with the fact that these Slovak dissidents were closer to the reform Communists in outlook. The Slovak dissidents insisted that a Czech reform Communist economist from Obroda, Valtr Komârek, join the round-table negotiations during the eighth and ninth rounds. They were interested in bringing Obroda on board, because they knew that Obroda members, especially Alexander Dubcek, were far more popular in Slovakia than themselves, and without them it would be impossible to put forth a convincing claim to represent the “nation.”10 In short, the dissidents were not the only ones who could lay a valid claim to representing “society.” Slovak reform Communists for­ mulated an alternative claim. This explains why the dissidents chose to ally themselves with a group of monetarist economists devoid of opposition credentials. From the very first meeting, the dissidents invited Vaclav Klaus, the leader of this group of economists, to par­ ticipate in the opposition delegation. They needed such experts who would not and could not become allies of the reform Communists, and could not threaten their hold on symbolic power. Without being invited by the dissidents, the monetarist economists could not lay claim to belonging to the “opposition.” In fact, throughout the period of late Communism they were mainly in “internal exile,” having

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retreated to the private sphere of family and friends, neither resisting the regime nor collaborating with it. The fact that they were invited by the dissidents to join the round-table negotiations allowed them to “borrow ” the minimal symbolic capital required to join the postCommunist elite. Yet, there was at least one thing in common between these two groups: the choice to become a monetarist econ­ omist paralleled the choice to become a dissident, in that it formu­ lated an anti-teleological and pastoral role for intellectuals, and was opposed to the reform Communist version of limited teleology and embeddedness. The alliance between them, therefore, was not only based on strategic needs but was also rooted in the fact of occupy­ ing a similar position in the space of discursive strategies.11 The zealous protection of their status as “opposition” during the round-table negotiations guaranteed that the dissidents would enter the new post-Communist period as holders of the symbolic power to represent “society” as its delegates. This power was immediately con­ verted into a dominant position in the new post-Communist politi­ cal field, at least in the Czech section of the country. The most prominent dissident, Vaclav Havel, soori became president. In the first post-Communist elections in June 1990, OF won an absolute majority in the Czech national assembly and, allied with VPN, also enjoyed an absolute majority in the federal assembly. The only other important political forces were the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSCS) and the Christian Democrats (the Christian Democratic Union (KDU) in the Czech Republic and the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH) in the Slovak Republic). The situation in Slova­ kia, however, was more complicated. VPN did not win a clear major­ ity in the Slovak national assembly and was forced to turn to KDH as coalition partner. Additionally, the Slovak National Party (SNS) and the Communists formed a sizeable opposition in the Slovak national assembly.12 Beyond solidifying the results of the round-table negotiations, and placing the representatives of OF and VPN at the helm, the 1990 elec­ tions were also significant because they did not create a bifurcated political field. Any argument that the split of Czechoslovakia was inevitable must confront this fact. The 1990 elections did not trans­ pose social interests in a polarized form onto the Czechoslovak politi­ cal field, but in a condensed form. The lines of cleavage between elites vying to impose the legitimate representation of social interests passed within parties rather than between them. On the Czech side, OF aggregated dissidents, monetarists, and reform Communists from Obroda. VPN, too, amalgamated dissidents, technocrats, reform Communists, and nationalists. Moreover, the 1990 elections did not

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create a bipolar political field, but the same triangular constellation that prevailed throughout most of Czechoslovak history, composed of a dominant Czech elite, a Slovak pro-Czech or pro-federalist elite (VPN), and a Slovak anti-Czech elite (SNS).13

The Formation of the “ Right” and “ Left” Ideological Packages How, then, did the Czechoslovak political field become dualized? How was it that, by 1992, instead of a tri-polar “condensed” field, Czech and Slovak voters were presented with the choice between a Czech right-wing and a Slovak left-wing ideological package? I propose to show that the process generating the two platforms was doubly determined both by considerations of electoral strategy and by the opposition between discursive strategies, in particular the struggle over the meaning of the past. The two key political actors identified their internal enemies and selected the proper strategies to defeat them in accordance with ideological tastes derived from their positions in the space of discursive strategies. This meant, however, that they drifted further and further apart from each other.

The political strategy of the right in the Czech Republic By late 1990, Vaclav Klaus was fast making himself the most impor­ tant politician in the Czech Republic. In January 1990, he was appointed federal finance minister. In October 1990, he was elected OF chairman and his economic reform program was passed by par­ liament. On 23 February, OF split and the greater part of its parlia­ mentary delegates went with Klaus to form the Civic Democratic Party (ODS). He was widely predicted to win the 1992 elections.14 The political strategy behind Klaus’s meteoric rise was to distinguish himself from both the reform Communists and the dissidents, and to address the interests of the much larger group of individuals who were neither. The main rhetorical device was to relegate both dissi­ dents and reform Communists to the past, as “men of ’68.” In Klaus’s hands, the rejection of the Communist past became a double-edged sword turned back at the dissidents who invented it. The main conflict between Klaus and the reform Communists was over economic policy: in particular, the pace of economic reforms and

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the nature of privatization. The centerpiece of Klaus’s proposal for economic reform was a “minimum bang” of overnight liberalization while maintaining wage control, a tight monetary and fiscal policy, and a combination of privatization methods - restitution, auctions, and voucher privatization. The logic guiding these steps was antiteleological: the most urgent task was to divest the state of its role as a planning center and to replace it with “free” markets. However weak these might be at first, they would at least permit economic leaders to become pastors rather than planners. On the other hand, the reform Communists argued that the first step should be a struc­ tural reform that would break the large state enterprises and create smaller, more efficient units, ready to compete in the market. Their logic was more in tune with a limited teleological role, as economic leaders would have to plan this restructuring of firms and regulate the introduction of markets. If markets were introduced overnight, they warned, “at least one-third of all enterprises [will be destroyed] . . . and there will be economic chaos.” They also criticized the various privatization measures suggested by Klaus and advocated some form of employee and managerial ownership.15 In September 1990, they challenged Klaus by submitting an alternative economic reform program to the federal assembly. Klaus responded by moving to expel them from OF and by arguing that, even if they were well intended, they were creating a slippery slope that would take the country back to communism: “The idea to first create competition, improve the productivity and competitiveness of our economy, and only then liberalize prices and the exchange rate is a fiction and it would lead us straight back to centralized planning.”16 Similarly, the proposal to privatize by means of employee ownership was irrational, unless one subscribed to “the socialist doctrine according to which the enterprise belongs to those who work in it.” 17 In effect, the monetarists represented the difference between them and the reform Communists not as two alternative proposals regard­ ing economic transformation but as a sharp fault-line separating past and present: There are basically two main groups. The first consists of former reformist economists of the 60s who . . . are basically again picking up efforts at reform they had to abandon after 1968. The second group is roughly of Klaus’s generation and mine. We belong . . . to the liberal economists who never wanted to reform socialism. We have always emphasized that socialism cannot be reformed, that the only thing that can be attempted is to . . . transform it into an entirely different system.18

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As with the dissidents’ assault on the “men of ’68” during the round­ table negotiations, the monetarists attacked any attempt to regulate the market economy as synonymous with restoring communism. There is no difference, they averred, between a reform Communist and a Communist “with no adjectives”: The perestroika men seemed to play together with us in the past when we all criticized the irrationalities of the old system, but when we started to build a new system they became the main opponents of our approach. Our rivals do not want a genuine market. They want to use the market as an instrument in their omnipotent hands . .. Simply, they want to centrally plan.!y

With the symbolic capital he had borrowed from the dissidents, Klaus managed to defeat his enemies in parliament and pass his reform proposal. The next battle erupted almost immediately over the restitution law. The reform Communists claimed that the pro­ posed legislation was economically irrational because it returned businesses into the hands of owners who were incapable of operat­ ing them. They also considered the legislation to send a dubious message: property was restored if it was confiscated after 1948 but not if it was impounded before that date, meaning that whatever the Communists nationalized was to be returned but not Jewish prop­ erty confiscated by the Nazis, nor Sudeten German property confis­ cated after their expulsion, nor property confiscated by the Benes government (which undertook a large nationalization drive during 1946-7). These were symbolically erased. The reform Communists found a ready ally in the agrarian lobby in Slovakia, which was vehemently opposed to the restitution of small farms and the break­ ing up of large agricultural cooperatives. Together, the two groups blocked the restitution law in the federal assembly. In reaction, Klaus promptly dissolved OF. The reform Communists joined the Social Democrats (CSSD) while most OF delegates joined Klaus to create ODS.20 The other struggle waged by Klaus on his road to power was against the dissidents. The main conflict was not over economic policy but over the style of political leadership, behind which lay the question of symbolic capital. Klaus’s attempts to turn OF into a political party and to impose party discipline on its members were resisted by the dissidents, in particular by “the president’s party” (i.e., the circle of Flavel’s closest friends and advisers), who preferred the format of a mass movement not simply because they personally hated

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discipline but also because this format was the most conducive to the wielding of dissident symbolic capital. Klaus correctly perceived that this format would constitute a limit on his authority: “At the time of implementation of the economic reform . . . the central issue is one of unity and discipline within OF and its ability to accept the govern­ ment’s decision.”21 When Klaus was elected chairman of OF and attempted to impose party discipline, the president’s party formed a “liberal” parliamentary club within OF and voted against the expul­ sion of the reform Communists. They knew that they would be the next to get the boot. Even in February 1991, when OF actually split, they still tried to maintain their moral authority by pleading to keep OF as a formal alliance between its different splinters, with Havel as its nominal leader, i.e., the best-known dissident with the most sym­ bolic capital. Klaus, of course, refused. As we saw above, in his struggle with the reform Communists, Klaus benefited from his association with the dissidents, who endowed his strategy with the symbolic capital needed to interpret and condemn the past. But this also meant that Klaus was depend­ ent on the dissidents and that oncé he clashed with them he was vul­ nerable to the same treatment to which he was submitting the reform Communists. Indeed, some dissidents began implying as much: “A critical analysis of our political development since 1989 shows that not simply old dissenters were among the politically active . . . but also people who . . . wanted in this way to cover up their com pro­ mising cooperation with the old regime.”22 Since the struggles against the dissidents and against the reform Communists were contemporaneous, Klaus’s problem was how to use in one struggle a weapon that was being continuously turned against him in the other. The solution was to split the dissident com­ munity by utilizing the emerging division between liberals and con­ servatives. Consequently, this struggle appeared as a debate not so much over the meaning of the past as over how best to deal with the sins of the past - whether the emphasis should be on confession or penance. The liberal dissidents emphasized the theme of universal guilt, i.e., the notion that under communism the whole population (apart from a virtuous few, the dissidents) was co-opted by the regime, and that therefore everybody was complicit in the crimes of communism. At the same time, they also emphasized the purify­ ing power of confession. In a sense, they strove to become pastors for the whole Czech nation, and thereby maintain a firmly “anti­ political” position in the political field: to be involved in politics without becoming stained by such involvement, to expend symbolic capital and yet accumulate more. Klaus and the conservative dissi-

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dents, on the other hand, campaigned for what came to be known as “lustration” (lustrace). They sought to pass legislation that would require screening the past careers of any individual seeking to hold parliamentary office, or jobs in high-level governmental offices, the military, intelligence services, police corps, state media, state-owned enterprises, railways, banks, universities, and the judicial bench. Anyone found to have been in the past a member of the secret police (STB) or an informer for it, a party official from the district level up, a member of the people’s militia, or the national front action com­ mittees, would be barred for a five-year period from holding these positions. They explicitly rejected the thesis of universal guilt and turned it back at its formulators: “It was not ‘we’ who did this. None of ‘us’ would ever have had the audacity, for we do not know this type of ambition. Behind every arrogant attempt to draw up completely new social institutions, there lurks the cerebral and sometimes physical violence of a handful of self-important intellec­ tuals.”25 Thus lustration meant that specific culprits would substitute for universal guilt; screening would substitute for voluntary con­ fession; and penance in the form of a fixed period of excommunica­ tion would substitute for the absolution granted by the confessor. It also implied that the power to condemn and absolve would be usurped from the dissidents and turned against them by whomsoever controlled the mechanisms of screening. Lustration was a powerful weapon not only against the reform Communists but also against the dissidents, since their names were constantly mentioned in $TB files as candidates for recruitment as informers, and the dissidents had nothing but their word to counter accusations that they had collaborated. While the lustration law was not passed in parliament until October 1991, the usurpation of the liberal dissidents began much earlier, as part of Klaus’s strategy to purge OF. Already in October 1990, OF members were required to sign a statement that they never cooperated with the $TB. This was a useful screening device in that, while seem­ ingly unambiguous, it could serve to substantiate later accusations against the dissidents (viz., that they “lied” in their response to screen­ ing). A more dramatic moment came on 2 March 1991 when, in a nationally televised session of the federal assembly, a parliamentary committee of inquiry named ten members of parliament as former secret police informers (as well as 50 top civil servants and 10 officials in the presidential chancellery, a stronghold of the liberal dissidents). Included among them was Jan Kavan, a prominent émigré who had served as a key liaison between the dissidents and the West. The attack on Kavan, who was known to have social-democratic affinities and

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whose father was a leading Communist executed in the 1950s, targeted the “weakest link” of the liberal dissidents. Many of them emerged out of the new left; they were active in the Prague Spring; they were indeed children of prominent Communists; in point of fact, most were members of the Communist Party until they were expelled. In addition to being identified as collaborators by the STB files, they were vulner­ able to being viewed (from the perspective they themselves helped to establish) as relics of the past, as “men of ’68” out of touch with the times, tainted by their previous contacts with communism. N ot only was a reform Communist indistinguishable from a Communist “with no adjectives,” but a liberal dissident was now no longer distinguish­ able from his enemies of old. Many were forced to resign under public pressure, and though they brought libel suits against their accusers, these took a long time to be decided by the courts (Kavan won his suit only in 1996).24 The struggle over lustration tore the dissident community apart and severely diminished the political efficacy of its members, since their claim for pastoral leadership had become suspect, tainted either by latent communism on the liberal side*or by politicization of the use of this authority on the conservative side. The conservative dis­ sidents who helped to install the lustration campaign could no longer claim an “anti-political” authority. Their monopoly over symbolic capital was gone. Once OF was dissolved, they formed two smaller parties - the Civic Democratic Alliance (ODA) and the Christian Democratic Union (KDU) - that became captive allies of the much larger ODS. That the splitting of the dissident community also severely weakened the liberal dissident faction was not immediately obvious. During the first months of 1991, polls showed that their splinter party, the Civic Movement (OH), was running neck-and-neck with ODS. Then came the debate about lustration. On 27 June, OH submitted legislation that would have barred from public office only individuals who violated “human rights” during communism. This “softer” version of lustration was couched in the distinct dissident idiom of universal guilt, since the violation of human rights did not identify “Communists” necessarily as the culprits. The bill was defeated in parliament. The lustration law introduced by the conser­ vative dissidents was subsequently passed on 4 October, and it helped to define the liberal dissidents as people who had something to hide, or at best as too “soft” and too “naïve.” The polls began to document a massive decline in support for OH, and defections to ODS rapidly followed. Despite the danger that it would fail to get enough votes to qualify for parliament, OH declined offers to

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form a joint list with the social democrats, fearing that this would seal their image as former Communists. As a result, in the June 1992 elections OH was eliminated from the political map, and its members were forced to join the social democrats whom they had spurned earlier.25 Elsewhere, I have described in considerable detail the ideological package forged by the right in the Czech Republic.261 will thus briefly summarize its main elements here: it was composed of lustration and the economic policies of the “minimum bang” - rapid liberalization, wage restriction, voucher privatization, and restitution. The common message of all these policies was that Czechs and Slovaks needed to sacrifice, not only for the sake of the future, but also in order to purify themselves from the corrupting influences o f the Communist past. The loss of 10.6 percent of jobs during the first year of transforma­ tion due to rapid liberalization was justified as a “ritual cleansing” of society that operated to “transform hearts and minds” by sending a clear message of condemnation of the past. The strict policy of wage control was justified as a form of penance paid by the workers for their past complicity with communism. Voucher privatization and restitution were justified as “correcting for the Communist injustices of the past” and, by the same token, as contributing “to psychologi­ cal changes in the people.” The original meaning of the term “lus­ tration,” adopted from the Latin lustrare, was “purification by sac­ rifice, purging,” referring to the Roman custom of sacrificing a scapegoat to appease the gods and cleanse society’s sins. Indeed, it was justified by reference to the idea that dealing with the past and condemning it was essential for the safety and normalcy of society in the present.27 The main argument of this section has been that the political strat­ egy of the right in the Czech Republic forged an ideological package centered on the symbolic imperative to reject and condemn the past. Despite the struggles between the monetarist economists and liberal and conservative dissidents, they all joined in the idiom of con­ demnation of the past because they shared an enemy in the reform Communists (to wit, the antagonism between cultural and political capital in the field of power), and they merged in the rituals of purifi­ cation because they shared a privileged position in post-Communist society (to wit, the struggle between the upper and lower regions of social space). Together, they justified this privileged position as pas­ toral leadership needed to extirpate a nation of sinners from their condition of internal enslavement and lead them through sacrifice to the promised land of “civil society.”

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T h e political strategy o f the left in Slovakia

Vladimir Meciar’s rise to power in Slovakia was even more meteoric than Klaus’s on the Czech side. After the round-table talks, in late 1989, he was nominated Slovak Interior Minister on Dubcek’s rec­ ommendation. At the same time he joined VPN and quickly became its candidate for prime minister, a position he assumed after VPN won the 1990 elections. M eäar continuously clashed with his coali­ tion partners and with the leadership of VPN. At the VPN congress of 23 February 1991, he attempted to take over the leadership of the movement but was defeated. As a result, he split from VPN on 5 March 1991 and formed the “Movement for a Democratic Slovakia” (HZDS), supported by Dubcek and by 32 out of 58 former VPN par­ liamentary representatives. Then, on 23 April, the VPN leadership managed to depose M eäar and replace him with KDH leader, Jan Carnogursky, as Slovak prime minister. Many observers judged at the time that this was an act of political suicide by VPN. Already popular in Slovakia, after his ouster M eäar became by far the most trusted Slovak politician (supported by 89 percent of the Slovak public according to polls), partly because his fall was perceived as having been engineered by Czech politicians.28 The political strategy that brought M eäar to power involved steer­ ing a middle course between the Slovak nationalist intellectuals con­ centrated in the Slovak National Party (SNS) and in Matica Slovenska (the Slovak national cultural society, dating from the nineteenth century), on the one hand, and the liberal dissidents concentrated mostly in VPN, on the other. In other words, Meciar was able to posi­ tion himself between the two traditional stances open to Slovak politi­ cians: namely, between the rebel struggling to break away from the unified state and the loyalist co-opted by the Prague establishment. Moreover, I would argue that he was able correctly to identify and steer this middle course because his political habitus was formed in the cru­ cible of reform communism. Consequently, he forged a “left” ideolog­ ical package that was the exact inverse of the Czech “right” ideological package: affirmation of the past, gradualist economic reforms, rejec­ tion of sacrifice, etc. As a shrewd political actor, relying on his instincts, M eäar continuously gravitated to this middle course, despite the obstacles he met on his way, because these instincts were formed in the milieu of reform communism. This last point is important inasmuch as M eäar was depicted by commentators as a cynical political actor, ready to sell his principles and change his skin at any moment in accor­ dance with the shifting winds of public opinion.29

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The main conflict between Meciar and the nationalists was over the “language law,” debated in the Slovak parliament during October 1990. More than anything, it was a struggle over the authority to represent the Slovak nation. At issue was not simply the matter of minority language rights but the attempt of nationalist intellectuals to concentrate in their hands the symbolic capital of legitimate dele­ gation. The language law was a symbolic act declaring Slovak to be the official language of the Slovak Republic and mandating its use in official documents, road signs, schools, etc. With it, Meciar and VPN attempted to present themselves as the delegates of the Slovak nation. They were upstaged, however, by SNS parliamentarians who sub­ mitted an alternative proposal that would have eliminated the lan­ guage rights of the Hungarian minority. Outside parliament, this alternative proposal was championed by the president of Matica Slovenska, Jozef Markus, together with SNS. They cast the struggle over the language law as a struggle over the territorial rights of the Slovak nation, against Hungarian irredentism. Matica Slovenska organized large demonstrations and a dramatic hunger strike in front of the parliament, protesting the government’s failure to defend the Slovak nation. Markus had an ambitious agenda for Matica Sloven­ ska, which he envisioned as leading the struggle for Slovak inde­ pendence, and thus possibly his springboard to political authority in the new state. Meciar could easily defeat the parliamentary opposi­ tion, but the activities outside parliament represented a direct chal­ lenge to his authority. His first response was to panic: he threatened members of SNS with arrest and lost his temper in a televised debate with Markus.30 Fast on the heels of the language debate came a second event which influenced Meciar’s strategy, the local elections of 23 November. In these elections VPN ceded its first place to KDH, which garnered about 27 percent of the popular vote. Surprisingly, SNS also did poorly. It seemed that neither the nationalists nor the federalists were carrying the day. KDH, on the other hand, as the junior coalition partner, was free to steer a middle course between them. It lashed out at VPN’s loyalty to the Czechs but at the same time avoided the inflammatory rhetoric of SNS. It simply presented itself as tougher and capable of extorting a better bargain from the Czechs.31 It is quite likely that considerations of electoral strategy prompted Meciar to begin to steer a similar middle course in order to compete with KDH. As I noted earlier, the formation of political strategy is always in response to a strategic situation. The other side of the coin, however, is that this response is always limited as well as enabled by the actor’s position in the political field and by the trajectory he has embarked

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upon. Meciar could not turn into a nationalist of the SNS variety overnight because he was a reform Communist. His middling strat­ egy was both limited and enabled by the discourse prevalent among reform Communists about “authentic federation” as an unfulfilled goal of the 1968 reforms. As he explained in his address to the Slovak national assembly on 27 August 1990, he considered as extremists both the advocates of a unitary state and the separatists. On the other hand, precisely because he was a reform Communist, his version of a middling strategy would prove much more effective than KDH’s in marginalizing the nationalists. The critique of the federation by a Catholic party (KDH), led by the son of a pre-Communist Slovak nationalist (Carnogursky), was too close to a position vindicating the Slovak Fascist state of World War II to be able to occupy the center of Slovak politics. Meciar, on the other hand, was able to draw on the reform Communist critique of “centralism” in order to position himself at one and the same time as a champion of Slovak autonomy (to upstage the nationalists) and as a democrat resisting the totali­ tarian habits of former Communist bureaucrats (to upstage the dissidents): If we are accused of wanting to break up the federation, we reply that we want to break centralism, the bureaucratic and administrative system. . . . We are accused of breaking up the state, but the end of centralization only means the beginning of real integration, integration [which] we understand as a natural merging of interests in economics, politics, culture, science and other areas.32 This strategy was able to capture the center of Slovak politics. Unlike competing political and discursive strategies, it involved explicit affirmation of the Communist past, as in the 1968 ideal of “authentic federation.” The dissident rejection of the Communist past, articulated by the liberal wing of VPN, was matched by a similar rejection among the extremist fraction in SNS, though for a different reason - reactionary nostalgia for the Slovak Fascist state. Meciar and his circle of reform Communists, by contrast, articulated a stance that was much more palatable to the Slovak public, and they could present themselves as centrist by affirming that part of the past when reform communism and the Slovak quest for autonomy converged. This strategy was displayed, in dramatic fashion, when Meciar attended the funeral of Gustav Husak in 1992. Hüsak was reviled by Czechs because he was installed in power after the Soviet invasion and presided over the repression of the Prague Spring. His stature in Slovakia, on the other hand, was more ambiguous. Before 1969, he

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was the foremost champion of Slovak nationalism within the Slovak Communist Party and was jailed in the 1950s as a “bourgeois nation­ alist.” Moreover, the one policy of the Prague Spring that he did not cancel was the federalization of Czechoslovakia, a long-standing Slovak demand. Thus, while the leaderships of VPN and KDH were conspicuously absent from his funeral, Meciar’s presence turned it into a highly charged symbolic moment, a political ritual transpos­ ing the lines of political struggle in Slovakia onto the plane of his­ torical memory and a struggle over the meaning of the past. By his appearance there, Meciar affirmed that the Communist past was not to be erased or purified; on the contrary, its remembrance was part of the collective work of re-imagining the nation.33 But this meant that a clash between Meciar and the liberals was inevitable. At issue here was the very relation to the Communist past. Hence the struggles between Meciar and the liberals took place over the two most conspicuous purification rituals of the right: economic policy and lustration. While the liberal leadership of VPN was eager to follow Klaus’s reforms, Meciar proved much more attuned to the interests of Slovak managers. Most of the economic ministries in his cabinet were held by other reform Communists who believed with Meciar that the pace of reforms should be slower, and who were uncomfortable with the policies of restitution and voucher privatiza­ tion. The VPN liberals, for their part, accused Meciar of stalling the reforms. In the ensuing debate, it became clear that Meciar and his circle of reform Communists would not go down in the same way as did their Czech colleagues, as they had at their disposal a much more profitable political strategy. Meciar counterattacked and laid the blame for the situation of the Slovak economy at the door of “Prague centralism.” The solution to the problem of economic transforma­ tion, he argued, was not to be sought in universal (i.e., monetarist) principles that could be applied everywhere - that was Communist thinking! Instead, the federal government should let each republic adjust flexibly in accordance with its own needs. Similarly, if restitu­ tion policy were to be genuinely corrective, it could not be dictated from the top by the federal government; since the property involved was “national property,” it should be returned to the Slovak nation first. “There is no federal nation,” Meciar put it, only Slovak and Czech nations.34 Thus, in response to the liberal attack, Meciar activated the notion of “authentic federation” and made it the center of his political strat­ egy. An authentic federation would give full autonomy to republican governments and was merely a contractual arrangement between them. This, he contended, was the original intent of the 1968

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federalization, subverted by the Soviets with the ready assistance of Czech politicians. N ot only was Meciar able to garner in this way the support of Slovak managers; he was also able to blunt the edges of the symbolic weapons of the right. All the symbolic relations care­ fully cultivated by the dissidents and the monetarist economists were inverted by the notion of “authentic federation.” While Klaus and his coterie were adept at casting their opponents as “reform Com­ munists” and insinuating that they were no different from Commu­ nists “without adjectives,” the doctrine of “authentic federation” implied that the true Communists at heart were the monetarists, since their preference for centralism subverted the federation just as during communism. While the rituals of purification practiced by the Czech right implied that whoever was not willing to castigate the whole Communist past was impure and lacking in commitment to the economic transformation, the notion of “authentic federation” countered that true transformation could only pass through the aban­ doned ideal of 1968.35 The model of an “authentic federation” began to govern the Slovak position already during the constitutional negotiations of 8-9 August 1990, when the Slovak team demanded the creation of three central banks - one for each republic and one federal. This led to the breakdown of negotiations, because nothing was as sacred to the monetarist economists as the central bank and a unified monetary policy. Then came a long debate over a “competencies law,” i.e., how to define the constitutional makeup of the federation, as Meciar insisted on an arrangement that would express the idea that the fed­ eration was delegated its powers by the republics. The monetarists were less averse to what they considered mostly a “symbolic” con­ cession, so long as the division of the central bank was off the table. Hence an agreement on the competencies law was reached on 5 November 1990, but the conservative dissidents blocked it in the federal assembly. Meciar presented an ultimatum: the agreement must pass or he would subordinate federal laws to the laws enacted by the Slovak National Council (SNC). Even the liberal leadership of VPN was behind him on this issue, and the united Slovak front carried the day. The federal assembly approved the competencies law on 12 December 1990, and Meciar addressed the SNC the next day with the words of Comenius: “Your government, oh Slovak people, has returned to your hands.”36 The liberals were fast becoming irrelevant, so they responded with the last weapon left at their disposal: lustration. But this backfired with disastrous consequences. On 10 January 1991, the Czech con­ servative dissident Vaclav Benda, speaking in the federal assembly,

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attributed the recent constitutional impasse to “members of the former secret police” among the Slovak leadership. Stories began to surface about Meciar’s collaboration with the secret police in the 1970s. The VPN leadership “apologized” to Meciar that they had no choice but to form a parliamentary committee of inquiry. Meciar’s response was to secede from VPN, establish HZDS, and announce that the Slovak government would not comply with the lustration law unless all relevant secret police files were “returned” to Slovakia. He also tried to replace the Interior Minister, who was in charge of the former secret police and its sensitive files, with one of his loyal­ ists. The Czech dissidents responded with accusations that likely served to further weaken the position of the VPN leadership, since they now reached further into the past and suggested not only that a reform Communist was no different from a Communist “without adjectives,” but also that both were no different from Nazis: It appears as if a new coalition is emerging in Slovakia consisting of reform Communists from 1968, contemporary Communists, sepa­ ratists, and people who think of the wartime Slovak state as the golden age in the history of the Slovak nation . . . [this coalition! . . . resurrects some aspects and notions connected with national socialism.37

Finally, the VPN leadership engineered a vote of no confidence in Meciar and replaced him with Carnogursky, the KDH leader. The outcome, however, was catastrophic from the political point of view. The deposed Meciar, who stood up to the Czechs, and happily was no longer responsible for the consequences of the economic reforms, became hugely popular as the representative of the poor and down­ trodden Slovaks. Put differently, by joining the Czechs and engineer­ ing Meciar’s removal, the VPN leadership allowed him to move into the newly defined center of Slovak politics. They drew a line between, on the one side, a Czech right-wing package of rejection of the past, lustration, centralized federalism, and monetarism, and, on the other side, a Slovak left-wing package of affirmation of the past, reform communism, “authentic federation,” and a gradualist economic policy. Thus positioned, HZDS attracted reform Communist tech­ nocrats, nationalist intellectuals, managers of state enterprises, workers, and the poor.38 A brief description of the ideological package forged by the Left in Slovakia will suffice to contrast it with the ideological package of the Czech Right. It was composed of a set of gradualist economic policies, opposition to lustration, and public rituals of commemora­ tion and invention of tradition. All of them expressed the inverse o f sacrifice and purification o f the past: namely, that the past was a cru-

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cible of suffering from which people have now emerged already exon­ erated, and that suffering is worthy of remembrance and preserva­ tion. As Meciar put it, “we do not want to hear any more that nobody among us is paying their share! Because Czechs and Slovaks together have paid up for a great many things during the past forty years.”39 The message of memory was dramatized in public rituals such as Husak’s funeral, but it was also conveyed by the emphasis on grad­ ualist economic policies, which were calculated to emphasize Slovak specificity and individuality, a unique “Slovak road” bridging the past and the future: “The basic conflict is between shock therapy or a system of gradual steps. Shock therapy brought Slovakia a great many evils. . . . It is a road to darkness. That’s why we logically say no, that for us it is either that a place for Slovak individuality will be created in the current macro-economic design or it will be the end of the unitary character of the reforms.”40 Opposition to lustration was justified in similar terms. Lustration, by trying to purge the past, would resurrect its least palatable elements. It would trigger a witch­ hunt no different from the ones performed by the Communists, and it would harm the Slovak nation by blacklisting some of the old func­ tionaries who served their country well and were still irreplaceable.41 In this way, the liberals of VPN were marginalized. When they called, Czech-style, for the purification of the past via economic reforms or lustration, they were immediately perceived as “bad Slovaks,” ready to sell the nation to the Czechs without regard to its past accom­ plishments on the road to self-determination. This political dynamic opened the road to the only solution to esca­ lating polarization overlaying the historic ethnic divide of the country: the breakup of the federation. In the June 1992 elections, a majority of Czechs - in particular, those better endowed with eco­ nomic and cultural capital - voted for Klaus, while a majority of Slovaks - but especially those endowed with political capital or lacking all forms of capital - voted for Meciar.42 For reasons that should be obvious from the preceding analysis, the negotiations between these two quickly came to naught, and so they decided to dissolve the federation. Thus the paradox of the split of Czechoslo­ vakia: it took place both against the wishes of the great majority of citizens and in accordance with their wishes, as a direct result of popular elections. This is a paradox typical of late-modern democ­ racies, for which analysis, as I hope to have shown here, the method­ ological and analytical tools developed by Pierre Bourdieu are eminently suited as they allow us to grasp how the political field transposes and sometimes inverts, and even subverts, the social divi­ sions among the electorate.

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Notes 1 Carol Skalnik Leff, The Czech and Slovak Republics: Nation versus State (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 128. The argument in this chapter is based on the fuller analysis in my book: Gil Eyal, The Origins o f Post-Communist Elites: From the Prague Spring to the Breakup o f Czechoslovakia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 2 Pierre Bourdieu, “Political Representation: Elements for a Theory of the Political Field” (1981), in his Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), pp. 171-202. 3 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Genesis of the Concepts of Habitus and Field,” Sociocriticism 2, no. 2 (1985): 11-24. 4 Bourdieu, “Political Representation,” p. 190; see also Pierre Bourdieu, “On Symbolic Power,” in Language and Symbolic Power, pp. 163-70, and idem, “The Mystery of Ministry,” chapter 3 in this volume. 5 Karl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1976). 6 Bourdieu, “Political Representation,” p. 185. 7 The idea that political capital was “de-institutionalized” follows from Bourdieu’s distinction between different “states” of capital, of which the most potent is the institutionalized state. Under communism, political capital was institutionalized as nomenklatura membership. The collapse of this institution did not eliminate the network assets of its members but reduced them to the less potent “embodied” state. Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology o f Education, ed. John G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1983), pp. 241-58. 8 About the teleological redistributor, see Gyorgy Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1979); about the various responses to its demise, see Eyal, Origins, pp. 26-34. 9 Jon Elster, ed., The Roundtable Talks and the Breakdown of Commu­ nism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 10 Ibid., pp. 147, 155, 159, 173; Shari J. Cohen, Politics without a Past: The Absence o f History in Post-Communist Nationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 126-9, 225-6. 11 Gil Eyal, “Anti-Politics and the Spirit of Capitalism: Dissidents, Monetarists, and the Czech Transition to Capitalism,” Theory & Society 29, no. 1 (February 2000): 59-92. 12 Gordon Wightman, “The Collapse of Communist Rule in Czechoslo­ vakia and the June 1990 Parliamentary Elections,” Parliamentary Affairs 44, no. 1 (January 1991): 94-113.

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13

14 15

16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27

28 29

30 31 32

33

GIL EYAL

About this triangular constellation, see Carol Skalnik Leff, National Conflict in Czechoslovakia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). Report on Eastern Europe, 2, no. 1: 13; ibid., 2, no. 4: 47. Bernard Wheaton and Zdenek Kavan, The Velvet Revolution, Czecho­ slovakia 1988-1991 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 158-9. Vladimir Dlouhy, in an interview in Lidové Noviny, 13 June 1990. Vaclav Klaus, quoted in Obcansky Denik, 12 October 1990. Dusan Tnska, quoted in Mlada Fronta, 12 September 1990. Vaclav Klaus, “Challenges of the Transformation Process: Lessons to be Learned from the Czechoslovak Experience,” in his Dismantling Socialism: A Preliminary Report (A Road to Market Economy II) (Prague: Top Agency, 1992), p. 12. Jin Pehe, “The First Weeks of 1991: Problems Solved, Difficulties Ahead,” Report on Eastern Europe 12, no. 10 (1991): 5-10. Vladimir Dlouhy, quoted in Lidové Noviny, 15 October 1990. Ladislav Hejdanek, quoted in Kvèty, 1 March 1991. Vaclav Klaus, quoted in Respekt 7, no. ,13 (1990). Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts after Communism (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). Abby Innés, “The Breakup of Czechoslovakia: The Impact of Party Development on the Separation of the State,” Eastern European Politics and Societies 11, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 403-4, n. 26. Eyal, “Anti-Politics.” Vojtëch Cepl, “The Transformation of Hearts and Minds in Eastern Europe,” Cato Journal 17, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 229-34; Jifina Siklova, “Lustration, or the Czech Way of Screening,” East European Consti­ tutional Review 5, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 57-62. Innés, “The Breakup of Czechoslovakia,” pp. 406-13. Karol Wolf, Podruhé a Naposled: aneb mirové dëleni Cekoslovenska (The Next and Last Time: or The Peaceful Breakup of Czechoslovakia) (Prague: G plus G, 1998), pp. 31-2. Innés, “The Breakup of Czechoslovakia,” pp. 412-13; Leff, The Czech and Slovak Republics, pp. 163—4; Wolf, Naposled, pp. 36-42. East Europe Report, 2, no. 12: 2; Wolf, Naposled, pp. 31-2. Vladimir Meciar, “Cesta k autentickej federacii” (Road to an Authen­ tic Federation), Pravda (29 August 1990), p. 6, my trans.; see also Vaclav Zâk, “The Velvet Divorce: Institutional Foundations,” in The End o f Czechoslovakia, ed. Jin Musil (Budapest: CEU Press, 1995), pp. 245-69, at pp. 255, 259. Cohen, Politics without a Past, pp. 145-50; Ladislav Holy, The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 110.

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34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42

177

Meciar, “Cesta”; Zak, “The Velvet Divorce,” p. 257; Wolf, Naposled, pp. 48, 57. Zak, “The Velvet Divorce,” p. 247. Wolf, Naposled, pp. 43-5; Zak, “The Velvet Divorce,” pp. 256-7. Michal Zantovskÿ, Havel’s spokesman, quoted in Mlada Fronta, 11 March 1991; Wolf, Naposled, pp. 30, 40, 86-7. luraj Tanasovesky, “Slovakia Resurgent,” East European Reporter 5, no. 4 (August 1992): 78-81. Meciar’s quote is from Prâca, 17 December 1990 (my trans.). Vladimir Meciar, “Je ziaduce, aby podobne postupovali i Cesi,” Nârodnâ Obroda, 25 March 1992 (my trans.). Vladimir Meciar, “Postoj k lustrâciam,” Nârodnâ Obroda, 14 January 1991; Vladimir Meciar, “Lustracie so slovenskymi podmienkami,” Verejnost, 14 January 1991. For a detailed analysis of voting patterns in the June 1992 elections, see Eyal, Origins, pp. 183-94.

9 The Cunning of Imperialist Reason Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant Cultural imperialism rests upon, the power to universalize particu­ larisms linked to a singular historical tradition by causing them to be misrecognized as such.1 Thus, just as in the nineteenth century a certain number of supposedly philosophical questions being debated as universal throughout Europe and beyond originated, as Fritz Ringer has shown conclusively, in the historical particularities (and conflicts) proper to the singular universe of German academics,2 so today numerous topics directly issuing from the intellectual con­ frontations relating to the social particularity of American society and its universities have been imposed, in apparently de-historicized form, upon the entire planet. These common places, in the Aristotelian sense of notions or theses with which one argues but about which one does not argue, or, put another way, these presuppositions of discussion that remain undiscussed, owe much of their power of persuasion to the fact that, circulating from academic conferences to best-selling books, from semi-scholarly journals to experts’ evalua­ tions, from governmental commissions’ reports to magazine covers, they are present everywhere at the same time, from Berlin to Beijing and from Milan to Mexico, and are powerfully supported and relayed

This is a revised and expanded translation of Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wac­ quant, “Sur les ruses de la raison impérialiste,” written as an afterword to the issue of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales devoted to “The Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” nos 121/2 (March 1998): 109-18. It is reprinted here by kind permission of Jérome Bourdieu and the journal.

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by those allegedly neutral channels that are international organiza­ tions (such as the OECD or the European Commission) and public policy centers and “think tanks” (such as the Brookings Institution in Washington, the Adam Smith Institute in London, and the SaintSimon Foundation in Paris).3 The neutralization of the historical context resulting from the international circulation of texts and from the correlative forgetting of their historical conditions of origin produces an apparent univer­ salization redoubled by the work of “theorization.” A kind of fic­ tional axiomatization fit to produce the illusion of a pure genesis, the game of preliminary definitions and deductions aimed at substituting the appearance of logical necessity for the contingency of denegated sociological causality tends to obfuscate the historical roots of a whole ensemble of questions and notions that will thus be called philosophical, sociological, historical, or political, depending on the field of reception. Thus planetarized, or globalized in a strictly geographical sense, by this uprooting at the same time as they are de-particularized by the effect of false rupture effected by conceptualization, these commonplaces of the great new global vulgate that endless media repetition gradually transforms into uni­ versal common sense manage in the end to make one forget that they have their roots in the complex and controversial realities of a par­ ticular historical society, now tacitly constituted as model for every other and as yardstick for all things. Such is the case, for instance, with the woolly and spongy debate around “multiculturalism,” a term which in Europe has been used mainly to designate cultural pluralism in the civic sphere, while in the United States it refers - if in distorted and veiled forms - to the endur­ ing sequelae of the exclusion of blacks and to the crisis of the national mythology of the “American dream” correlative of the generalized increase in inequalities over the past three decades.4 This is a crisis that the word “multicultural” veils by artificially restricting it to the sole academic microcosm and by expressing it in an ostensibly “ethnic” register, when its principal stake is not the recognition of marginalized cultures by academic canons but access to the instru­ ments of (re)production of the middle and upper classes - and, first among them, to the university - in the context of massive and multi­ sided state retrenchment.5 From this example, one can see in passing that, among the cultural products now being diffused on a planetary scale, the most insidious are not apparently systematic theories (such as “the end of history” or its cousin, the tale of “globalization”) and philosophical world views (or views claiming to be such, like “postmodernism”), as these

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are quite easy to spot. Rather, they are those isolated and apparently technical terms such as “flexibilité” (or its British equivalent, “employability” ) which, because they encapsulate and silently com­ municate a whole philosophy of the individual and social organiza­ tion, are well suited to functioning as veritable political codewords and mottoes (in this case: the need for firm downsizing and the den­ igration of the state, the reduction of social protection, and the acceptance of the diffusion of precarious wage labor as a fate, nay a boon). One could analyze here also, in all of its presuppositions and impli­ cations, the strongly polysémie notion of “globalization,” which has the effect, if not the function, of submerging the effects of economic imperialism in cultural ecumenism or economic fatalism and of making transnational relationships of power appear to be a neutral necessity. As a result of a symbolic inversion based on the natural­ ization of the schemata of neoliberal thought, whose domination has been imposed for some 20 years by the relentless sapping of conser­ vative think tanks and their allies in the political and journalistic fields,6 the refashioning of social relations and cultural practices in advanced societies after the US pattern - founded on the pauperiza­ tion of the state, the commodification of public goods, and the gen­ eralization of social insecurity - is nowadays accepted with resignation as the inevitable outcome of the evolution of nations, when it is not celebrated with a sheepish enthusiasm eerily reminis­ cent of the infatuation with America that the Marshall Plan had aroused in a devastated Europe half a century ago.7 A number of related themes that recently appeared on the European intellectual scene, and especially on the Parisian scene, have thus crossed the Atlantic in broad daylight or have been smuggled in under cover in the wake of the revived influence enjoyed by the prod­ ucts of American research, such as “political correctness” - para­ doxically used, in French intellectual circles, as an instrument of reprobation and repression against every subversive impulse, espe­ cially feminist or gay - or the moral panic over the “ghettoization” of so-called immigrant neighborhoods, or, again, the moralism that insinuates itself everywhere, through an ethical vision of politics, the family, crime, etc., leading to a kind of principled de-politicization of social and political problems, thereby stripped of any reference to any kind of domination, or, finally, the opposition, that has become canonical in the regions of the intellectual field closest to cultural journalism, between “modernism” and “postmodernism” which, founded on an eclectic, syncretic, and, most often, de-historicized and highly approximate rereading of a posse of French and German

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authors, is in the process of being imposed in its American form upon the Europeans themselves.8 One would need to grant special attention and to examine in some detail the debate that currently opposes the “liberals” to the “com­ munitarians”9 (words directly transcribed into the various European languages, as with the French libéral and commnnitarien, and not translated, from the English) as an exemplary illustration of the effect of false rupture and false universalization produced by the shift to the register of discourse with philosophical pretensions: item, found­ ing définitions signaling an apparent break with the historical par­ ticularisms relegated to the background of the thought of the historically situated and dated thinker (how could one not see, for instance, as has been suggested repeatedly, that the dogmatic char­ acter of Rawls’s argument for the priority of basic liberties is explained by the fact that he tacitly attributes to the parties in the originating situation a latent ideal that is none other than his own, that of an American academic wedded to an ideal vision of American democracy?10); item, anthropological presuppositions that are anthropologically unjustified but endowed with all the social authority of the neo-marginalist economic theory from which they are borrowed; item, pretension to rigorous deduction, which allows one to string together in formal fashion unfalsifiable consequences without ever being exposed to the slightest empirical test; item, ritual and derisory alternatives between the atomistic individualists and the holistic collectivists - so visibly absurd that the “holistic individual­ ists” have to be invented to accommodate Humboldt - or the “atom­ istic collectivists”; all of this in an extraordinary jargon, a terrible (and terrifying) international lingua franca that allows one to drag along all of the particularities and the particularisms associated with national traditions of philosophy and politics without ever taking them consciously into account (as when, for instance, such a French author takes care to write liberty in parentheses after the word liberté but accepts without discussion such conceptual barbarisms as the opposition between the procédurel and the substantiel). This debate, and the “theories” that oppose themselves in it, between which it would be vain to try to introduce a political choice, no doubt owes part of its success amongst philosophers - mainly conservative and especially Catholic philosophers - to the fact that it tends to reduce politics to morality: the vast discourse, skillfully neutralized and politically de-realized, that it has elicited is a timely successor to the great German tradition of philosophical anthropology, this noble and falsely profound discourse of denegation (Verneinung) that has for so long formed a screen and an obstacle to the scientific analysis of

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the social world wherever (German) philosophy could assert its domination.11 To turn to a domain closer to political realities, a debate such as that swirling around “race” and identity has given rise to similar, if more brutal, ethnocentric intrusions. A historical representation, born from the fact that the American tradition superimposes on an infinitely more complex social reality a rigid dichotomy between whites and blacks, can even impose itself in countries where the oper­ ative principles of vision and division of ethnic differences, codified or practical, are quite different and which, as in Brazil, were until recently considered as counter-examples to the “American model.” 12 Carried out by Americans and by Latin Americans trained in the United States (or in US-sponsored programs in their own country), most of the recent research on ethno-racial inequality in Brazil strives to prove that, contrary to the image that Brazilians have of their own nation, the country of the “three sad races” (indigenous peoples, blacks descended from slaves, and whites issued from colonization and the subsequent waves of European immigration) is no less “racist” than others and that Brazilian “whites” have nothing to envy their North American cousins on this score. Worse yet, Brazilian racismo mascarado should by definition be regarded as more perverse precisely on account of being dissimulated and denegated. This is the claim of Afro-American political scientist Michael Hanchard in Orpheus and Power:13 by unthinkingly applying North American racial categories to the Brazilian situation, this book makes the par­ ticular history of the US Civil Rights movement of the post-World War II decades, rooted in the unique rigidity and violence of a regime of domination born of a founding contradiction between democracy and racialized slavery unknown in any other society,14 into the uni­ versal standard for the struggle of all groups oppressed on grounds of color (or caste). Instead of dissecting the constitution of the Brazil­ ian ethno-racial order according to its own logic, such inquiries are most often content to replace wholesale the national myth of “racial democracy” (as expressed for instance in the works of Gilberto Freyre15) by the militant counter-myth according to which all soci­ eties are “racist,” including those within which “race” relations seem at first sight to be far less distant and hostile (nay sometimes non­ existent as such). From being an analytic tool, the concept of racism becomes a mere instrument of accusation; under the guise of science, it is the logic of the trial which asserts itself (and ensures book sales, for lack of success based on intellectual esteem).16 In a classic article published 30 years ago, the anthropologist Charles Wagley showed that the conception of “race” in the

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Americas admits of several definitions according to the differential weight granted to descent, physical appearance (itself not confined to skin color), and sociocultural status (occupation, income, education, region of origin and residence, etc.), depending on the history of set­ tlement, intergroup relations, and symbolic conflicts in the different geographic zones.17 Due to the peculiar circumstances of their colo­ nization, Americans in the United States are alone in defining “race” solely on the basis of descent, and this, only in the case of African Americans: one is “black” in Chicago, Los Angeles, or Atlanta, not by the color of one’s skin but for having one or more ancestors iden­ tified as black, that is to say, at the end of the regression, as African slaves. The United States is the only modern society to apply the “one-drop rule” conjointly with the principle of hypodescent, accord­ ing to which the offspring of a mixed union find themselves auto­ matically assigned to the group deemed inferior - here the erstwhile named “Negroes.” In Brazil, by contrast, ethno-racial identity is defined not genealog­ ically but by reference to a continuum of “color,” that is, by use of a flexible or fuzzy phenotypical principle which takes account of physical traits such as skin tone, texture of hair, and the shape of the lips and nose, to generate a large number of gradational and partly overlapping categories (over a hundred of them were recorded by the 1980 Census).18 Racial categorization is also qualified by class posi­ tion (notably income, occupation, and education), and varies strongly by region, with the result that the same individual may receive a dif­ ferent racial designation depending on where he lives and how much money he earns, while two full siblings may be categorized in dif­ ferent “races,” two phenomena that are ruled out in the US racial classification scheme. This is not to say that invidious distinctions and deep inequalities pegged to this ethno-racial gradient do not exist in Brazil, for clearly they do; it is to stress that the symbolic con­ struction of “race” in this country has endowed group boundaries and relations with a relative porousness and malleability that the black/white dichotomy fails to capture; in particular, these relations do not entail radical ostracization and exclusionary stigmatization without recourse or remedy across the social structure. Evidence for this is provided by the strategies of ethno-racial mobility through marrying up the color ladder pursued by darker-skin Brazilians, the segregation indices sported by Brazilian cities, strikingly lower than those for US metropolitan areas (typical of what in the USA would pass for “integrated neighborhoods”), and the virtual absence of these two typically US forms of ethno-racial violence that are public lynchings and urban race riots.19 Quite the opposite in the United

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States, where there exists no socially and legally recognized category of métis (mixed-race) following their symbolic eradication in the first decades of the twentieth century.20 In this case we are faced with a division that is closer to that between definitively defined and delim­ ited castes or quasi-castes (proof is the exceptionally low rate of inter­ marriage to this day: fewer than 3 percent of African-American women aged 25 to 34 contracted “mixed” unions in the 1980s, as against about half of women of Latino origin and four-fifths of AsianAmerican women),21 a division that one strives to conceal by sub­ merging it within the universe of differentiating visions “revisioned” through US lenses by means of “globalization.” How are we to explain that “theories” of “race relations” that are but thinly conceptualized transfigurations, endlessly refurbished and updated to suit current political concerns, of the most commonly used racial stereotypes that are themselves only primary justifications for the domination of whites over blacks in one society,22 could be tacitly (and sometimes explicitly) raised to the status of universal standards whereby every situation of ethnic domination must be analyzed and measured?23 The fact that this racial (or racist) sociodicy was able to “globalize” itself in recent years, thereby losing its outer characteris­ tics of legitimating discourse for domestic usage, is no doubt one of the most striking proofs of the symbolic dominion and hold exercised by the United States over every kind of scholarly and, especially, semischolarly production, notably through the power of consecration they possess and through the material and symbolic profits that researchers in the dominated countries reap from a more or less assumed or ashamed adherence to the model issued from the United States. For one may say, with Thomas Bender, that the products of American research have acquired “an international stature and a power of attraction” comparable to those of “American cinema, pop music, computer software and basketball.”24 Symbolic violence is indeed never wielded but through a form of (extorted) complicity on the part of those who are subjected to it: the “globalization” of the themes of American social doxa, or of its more or less sublimated transcription in semi-scholarly discourse, would not be possible without the collaboration, conscious or unconscious, directly or indi­ rectly interested, of all the passeurs, “carriers” and importers of designer or counterfeit cultural products (publishers, directors of cultural institutions such as museums, operas, galleries, journals, heads of research centers, etc.) who, in the country itself or in the target countries, propound and propagate, often in utter good faith, American cultural products, and of all the American cultural author­ ities which, without need for explicit connivance, accompany, orches-

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träte, and sometimes even organize the process of collective conver­ sion to the new symbolic Mecca.25 But all these mechanisms, which have the effect of fostering a ver­ itable “globalization” of American problems (in the sense of author­ itative planetary diffusion), thereby verifying the Americano-centric belief in “globalization” understood, quite simply, as the American­ ization of the Western world and, by gradual expansion, of the entire universe, these mechanisms are not enough to explain the tendency of the American viewpoint, scholarly or semi-scholarly, to impose itself as universal point of view, especially when it comes to issues, such as that of “race,” where the particularity of the American con­ figuration is particularly flagrant and particularly far from being exemplary. One could obviously invoke here also the driving role played by the major American philanthropic and research founda­ tions in the diffusion of the US racial doxa within the Brazilian aca­ demic field at the level of both representations and practices, or in another domain of the juridical and moral categories of “human rights” and “philanthropy.”26 Thus the Rockefeller Foundation and similar organizations fund a program on “Race and Ethnicity” at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro as well as at the Center for AfroAsiatic Studies at Candido Mendes University (and its journal Est ados Afro-asiâticos) so as to encourage exchanges of researchers and students. But the intellectual current flows in one direction only: US categories and problematics (starting with the dichotomous black-white division) travel south, but Brazilian experiences and counterpoints are rarely if ever repatriated north to question the peculiar ways in which the United States has constructed its “race” question and how this construction has in turn been unthinkingly transcribed into the analytical apparatus of its national social science. And, as a condition for its aid, the Rockefeller Foundation asks that research teams apply US criteria of “affirmative action,” which poses insuperable problems since, as we have just seen, the application of the white-black dichotomy in Brazilian society is, to say the least, hazardous. Alongside the role of philanthropic foundations, one must finally include the internationalization of academic publishing among the factors that have contributed to the diffusion of “made-in-the-USA” thought in the social sciences. The growing integration of the pub­ lishing of English-language academic books (nowadays sold, often by the same houses, in the United States and in the different countries of the former British Commonwealth, but also in the smaller, poly­ glot, nations of the European Union such as Sweden and the Nether­ lands, and in all the societies most directly exposed to American

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cultural domination) and the erosion of the boundary between aca­ demic and trade publishing have helped encourage the putting into circulation of terms, themes, and tropes with strong (real or hoped) market appeal which, in turn, owe their power of attraction essen­ tially to the very fact of their wide diffusion. For example, Basil Blackwell, the large, half-commercial, half-academic publishing house (what the British call a “crossover press”), does not hesitate to impose titles on its authors that are in accord with this new plane­ tary common sense that it contributes to forging under the guise of echoing it. Such is the case with the collection of texts on new forms of urban marginality in Europe and America assembled in 1996 by the Italian sociologist Enzo Mingione: it was dressed up with the title Urban Poverty and the Underclass against the better judgment and will of its editor and of several of the contributors, since the entire book tends to demonstrate the vacuity of the notion of “underclass” - Blackwell even refused to put the term in inverted commas.27 Faced with the manifest reticence of its authors, it is all too easy for Basil Blackwell to claim that an enticing title is the only way to avoid a high selling price that would in any case kill the volume in question. Thus it is that decisions of pure book marketing orient research and university teaching in the direction of homogenization and of sub­ mission to fashions coming from America, when they do not fabri­ cate wholesale “disciplines” such as “Cultural Studies,” this mongrel domain, born in England in the 1970s, which owes its international dissemination (which is the whole of its existence) to a successful policy of editorial propaganda. Thus the fact, for instance, that this “discipline” does not exist in the French university and intellectual fields did not prevent Routledge from publishing a compendium enti­ tled French Cultural Studies, on the model of British Cultural Studies (there are also volumes of German Cultural Studies and Italian Cul­ tural Studies by rival publishers). And one may forecast that, by virtue of the principle of ethnico-editorial parthenogenesis in fashion today, we shall soon find in bookstores a handbook of French-Arab Cultural Studies to match its cross-Channel cousin, Black British Cul­ tural Studies that appeared in 1997 (but bets remain open as to whether Routledge will dare German-Turkish Cultural Studies). Yet all of these factors taken together cannot completely explain the hegemony that US production exercises over the intellectual world market. This is where one must take into account the role of those at the helm of strategies of conceptual “import-export,” those mystified mystifiers who can transport unknowingly the hidden - and often accursed - share of the cultural products they put into circula­ tion. What are we to think indeed of those American researchers who

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travel to Brazil to encourage the leaders of the Movimento Negro to adopt the tactics of the African-American Civil Rights movement and to denounce the category of pardo (an intermediary term between branco (white) and preto (black) designating people of mixed physi­ cal appearance) in order to mobilize all Brazilians of African descent on the basis of a dualistic opposition between “Afro-Brazilians” and “whites” modeled on the US dichotomous divide at the very time when, in the United States, people of mixed origin, including so-called blacks (the vast majority of whom are of mixed parentage), are mobi­ lizing to obtain from the US federal state (beginning with the Census Bureau) official recognition of “multiracial” Americans by ceasing to categorize them forcibly under the single label “black” ?28 Such dis­ cordance justifies us in thinking that the recent, as well as unexpected, discovery of the “globalization of race”29 results, not from a sudden convergence of forms of ethno-racial domination in the various coun­ tries, but from the quasi-universalization of the US folk concept of “race” as a result of the successful worldwide export of US scholarly categories. A similar demonstration could be given with respect to the inter­ national diffusion of the true-false concept of underclass which, through an effect of transcontinental allodoxia typical of the uncon­ trolled circulation of ideas, has been imported by those Old-World sociologists most desirous of experiencing a second intellectual youth by surfing on the wave of popularity of concepts stamped with the US seal.30 To summarize quickly, in this label European researchers hear “class” and believe that reference is being made to a new posi­ tion in the structure of urban social space, while their American col­ leagues hear “under” and think of a heap of dangerous and immoral poor people in a resolutely Victorian and racistoid perspective. Yet, Paul Peterson, a distinguished professor of government at Harvard University and director of the Committee for Research on the Urban Underclass of the Social Science Research Council (financed yet again by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations), leaves no grounds for uncertainty or ambiguity when he summarizes approvingly the findings of a major conference on the “underclass” held in Evanston, Illinois, in 1990 in terms that hardly need to be commented upon: The term is powerful because it calls attention to the conjunction between the characters of individuals and the impersonal forces of the larger social and political order. “Class” is the least interesting half of the word. Although it implies a relationship between one social group and another, the terms of this relationship are left undefined until com-

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bined with the familiar word “under”. This transformation of a prepo­ sition into an adjective has none of the sturdiness of “working”, the banality of “middle”, or the remoteness of “upper”. Instead, “under” suggests the lowly, passive, and submissive, yet at the same time the disreputable, dangerous, disruptive, dark, evil, and even hellish. Apart from these personal attributes, it suggests subjection, subordination, and deprivation.31

In each national intellectual field, passeurs, or carriers (sometimes just one, sometimes several in competition with each other), have stepped forth to take up this scholarly myth and to reformulate in these alienated terms the question of the relations between urban poverty, immigration, and segregation in their country. One loses count of the articles and works that purport to prove - or, what amounts almost to the same thing, to disprove - with fine positivist diligence, the “existence” of this “group” in such-and-such a society, city, or neighborhood, on the basis of empirical indicators often badly constructed and badly correlated among themselves.32 To pose the question of whether there exists an “underclass” (a term that some French sociologists have not hesitated to translate as “sous-classe,” no doubt anticipating the introduction of the concept of “soushommes” or Untermensch) in London, Lyon, Leiden, or Lisbon, is to suppose at the least, on the one hand, that the term is endowed with minimal analytic consistency and, on the other hand, that such a “group” actually exists in the United States.33 Now, the semi-journalistic, semi-scholarly notion of “underclass” is as devoid of semantic coherence as it is of social existence. The incon­ gruous populations that American researchers usually regroup under this term - welfare recipients and the long-term unemployed, unmar­ ried mothers, single-parent families, rejects from the school system, criminals and gang members, drug addicts and the homeless, when they do not refer to all ghetto dwellers in bulk - owe being included in this catch-all category to one fact and one fact only: they are perceived as menacing and living denials of the “American dream” of opportu­ nity for all and individual success. The kindred “concept” of exclusion is commonly used, in France and in a growing number of other European countries (notably under the influence of the European Commission), at the intersection of the political, journalistic, and scientific fields with the similar functions of de-historicization and de­ politicization by picturing an old and well-known phenomenon - mass unemployment and its sapping social effects on the urban proletariat - as a novel development somehow disconnected from state policies of economic deregulation and welfare retrenchment. All of which gives

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us an idea of the inanity of the project to retranslate a nonexistent notion into another just as nondescript.34 Indeed, the “underclass” is but a hctional group, produced on paper by the classification practices of those scholars, journalists, and related experts in the management of the (black urban) poor who share in the belief in its existence because it is well suited to giving renewed scientific legitimacy to the ones and a politically and com­ mercially profitable theme to mine for the others.35 Inapt and inept in the American case, the imported concept adds nothing to the knowledge of contemporary European societies. For the modalities of and methods for the government of poverty are vastly discrepant on the two sides of the Atlantic, not to mention differences in ethnic divisions and their political status.36 It follows that “problem popu­ lations” are neither defined nor treated in the same manner in the United States and in the different countries of the Old World. Yet most extraordinary of all is no doubt the fact that, in keeping with a paradox that we already encountered with regard to other phony concepts of the globalized vulgate, the notion of “underclass” which has come to us from America was in fact born in Europe - as was that of “ghetto” which it serves to obfuscate, in keeping with the severe political censorship that weighs upon research on urban and racial inequality in the United States. It is the economist Gunnar Myrdal who coined it in the 1960s by derivation from the Swedish onderklass. But his intention then was to describe the process of mar­ ginalization of the lower fractions of the working class in wealthy countries in order to criticize the ideology of the generalized embour­ geoisement of capitalist societies.37 One can see here how profoundly the detour through America can transform an idea: from a structural concept aimed at questioning the dominant representation of society emerges a behavioral category custom-made to reinforce that repre­ sentation by imputing to the “antisocial” conducts of the most dis­ advantaged responsibility for their own dispossession. These misunderstandings are due in part to the fact that the transatlantic “carriers” in the different importing intellectual fields who produce, reproduce, and circulate all these (false) problems, while levying in the process their small “cut” of the attendant mate­ rial or symbolic profits, are exposed to a double heteronomy, owing to their position and to their scholarly and political habitus. On the one hand, they look towards America, the supposed home and hearth of social and scientific (post-)“modernity,” but they are themselves dependent upon American scholars who export intellectual products (often soiled and faded) abroad because they do not usually have direct and specific knowledge of US institutions and culture. On the

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other hand, they lean toward journalism, toward the seductions it offers and the immediate success it procures and, consequently, toward the themes that crop up at the intersection of the fields of the media and politics, right at the point of maximum yield on the exter­ nal market (as would be shown by an enumeration of the compla­ cent reviews that their works receive in highly visible magazines). Whence their predilection for soft problematics, neither truly jour­ nalistic (they adorn themselves with concepts) nor completely scien­ tific (they pride themselves on being in symbiosis with “the actors’ point of view” ), which are nothing but the semi-scholarly retransla­ tion of the salient social problems of the day into an idiom imported from the United States (in the 1990s: ethnicity, identity, minority, community, fragmentation, etc.) and which succeed each other according to an order and tempo dictated by the media: youths of the banlieue, the xenophobia of the declining working class, the mal­ adjustment of high-school and university students, urban violence, the turn to Islam, and so on. These sociologist-journalists, always ready and eager to comment on current affairs and every so-called fait de société in a language at once accessible and “modernist,” and therefore often perceived as vaguely progressive (in relation to the “archaisms” of old-line European thought), contribute in a particu­ larly paradoxical way to the imposition of a vision of the world which, surface appearances notwithstanding, is far from being incom­ patible with those produced and conveyed by the great international think tanks more or less directly plugged into the spheres of economic and political power. As for those in the United States who, often without realizing it, are engaged in this vast international enterprise of cultural importexport, they occupy for the most part dominated positions in the American field of power and even, very often, in the intellectual field. Just as the products of America’s big cultural industry like jazz or rap, or the commonest food and clothing fashions like jeans, owe part of the quasi-universal seduction they wield over youths to the fact that they are produced by or associated with subordinate minori­ ties in the United States,38 so the topics of the new world vulgate no doubt derive a good measure of their symbolic efficacy from the fact that, supported by specialists from disciplines perceived to be m ar­ ginal or subversive, such as Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, Gay Studies, or Women’s Studies, they take on, in the eyes of writers from the former European colonies, for example, the allure of messages of liberation. Indeed, cultural imperialism (American or otherwise) never imposes itself better than when it is served by progressive intel­ lectuals (or by “intellectuals of color” in the case of ethno-racial

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inequality) who would appear to be above suspicion of promoting the hegemonic interests of a country against which they wield the weapons of social critique. Thus the various articles that compose the summer 1996 issue of the journal Dissent, mouthpiece of the demo­ cratic “Old Left” of New York City, devoted to “Embattled Minori­ ties Around the Globe: Rights, Hopes, Threats,”39 projects upon the whole of humankind, with the humanist goodwill characteristic of a certain strand of the academic Left, not only US “liberal” common sense but the notion of minority (we should always keep the English word to remind ourselves that we are dealing with a folk concept imported into theory - and yet again one of European origin40) which presupposes precisely that which needs to be demonstrated: that cat­ egories cut out from within a given nation-state on the basis of “cul­ tural” or “ethnic” traits have the desire or the right to demand civic and political recognition as such. But the forms under which indi­ viduals seek to have their collective existence and membership(s) rec­ ognized by the state vary at different times and places as functions of historical traditions, and they always constitute a stake of strug­ gle in history. In this manner, an apparently rigorous and generous comparative analysis can, without its authors even realizing it, con­ tribute to rendering a problematic made by and for Americans seem to be universal. We thus come upon a double paradox. In the struggle for the monopoly over the production of the vision of the social world that is universally recognized as universal, in which it nowadays occupies an eminent, not to say preeminent, position, the United States is cer­ tainly exceptional, but its exceptionalism does not reside where the national sociodicy and social science agree in locating it, namely, in the fluidity of a social order that offers extraordinary opportunities for mobility (especially in comparison with the supposedly rigid social structures of the Old World): the most rigorous comparative studies converge to conclude that the United States does not differ fundamentally in this respect from other post-industrial nations, even though the span of class inequality is notably wider in America.41 If the United States is truly exceptional, in accordance with the old Toequevillian thematics untiringly reprised and periodically updated, it is above all for the rigid dualism of its racial division. Even more so, it is for its capacity to impose as universal that which is most par­ ticular to it while passing off as exceptional that which makes it most common. If it is true that the de-historicization that almost inevitably results from the migration of ideas across national boundaries is one of the factors contributing to de-realization and false universalization

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(as, for exam ple, w ith theoretical “faux am is” ), then only a genuine history of the genesis of ideas about the social w orld, joined w ith an analysis of the social m echanism s of the international circulation of those ideas, can lead scientists, in this dom ain as elsewhere, to a better m astery of those instrum ents w ith w hich they argue w ithout taking the trouble to argue beforehand ab o u t them .42 (Translated by Loïc W acquant)

N o te s

1 It bears stressing at the outset to avoid any misunderstanding - and to ward off the predictable accusation of “anti-Americanism” - that nothing is more universal than the pretension to the universal or, more accurately, to the universalization of a particular vision of the world; and that the demonstration sketched here would hold, mutatis mutan­ dis, for other domains and other couritries, notably for France, as argued in Pierre Bourdieu, “Deux impérialismes de l’universel,” in L’Amérique des Français, ed. Christiane Fauré and Tom Bishop (Paris: Éditions François Bourin, 1992), pp. 148-55. 2 Fritz Ringer, The Decline o f the Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 3 Amongst the books that attest to this rampant McDonaldization of thought, one may cite the elitist jeremiad of Alan Bloom, The Closing o f the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), immedi­ ately translated into French by Éditions Julliard under the spiritualist title L’Âme désarmée (“The Disarmed Soul,” 1987), and the angry pamphlet by the neo-conservative Indian immigrant (and biographer of Reagan) based at the Manhattan Institute, Dinesh D’Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics o f Race and Sex on Campus (New York: The Free Press, 1991), translated into French as L’Éducation contre les lib­ ertés (“Education against Freedom,” Paris: Gallimard, Collection Le Messager, 1993). One of the best indicators to spot the works partak­ ing of this new intellectual doxa with planetary pretensions is the quite unusual speed with which they are translated and published abroad (especially in comparison with scientific works). For a comprehensive native vision of the joys and sorrows of contemporary American aca­ demics, see the recent issue of Daedalus devoted to “The American Aca­ demic Profession” (no. 126, Fall 1997), especially Burton R. Clark, “Small Worlds, Different Worlds: The Uniqueness and Troubles of American Academic Professions,” pp. 21-42, and Philip G. Altbach,

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“An International Academic Crisis? The American Professoriate in Comparative Perspective,” pp. 315-38. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making o f the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1993); Mary Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Ethnic Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995); and Jennifer Hochschild, Facing up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (Prince­ ton: Princeton University Press, 1996); for an analysis of all these ques­ tions that rightfully spotlights their historical roots and recurrence, Denis Lacorne, La Crise de l’identité américaine. Du melting pot au multiculturalisme (Paris: Fayard, 1997). On the imperative of cultural recognition, Charles Taylor, Multicultur­ alism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton Uni­ versity Press, 1994), and the texts collected and presented by Theo Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994); on the floundering of the strategies of perpetuation of the US middle class, Loïc Wacquant, “La généralisation de l’insécu­ rité salariale en Amérique: restructurations d’entreprises et crise de reproduction sociale,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 115 (December 1996): 65-79; the deep malaise of the American middle class is well depicted by Katherine Newman, Declining Fortunes: The Withering of the American Dream (New York: Basic Books, 1993). Pierre Grémion, Preuves, une revue européenne à Paris (Paris: Julliard, 1989), and Intelligence de l’anticommunisme. Le Congrès pour la liberté de la culture à Paris (Paris: Fayard, 1995); James A. Smith, The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise o f the New Policy Elite (New York: The Free Press, 1991); and David M. Ricci, The Transformation o f American Politics: The New Washington and the Rise of Think Tanks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). On “globalization” as an “American project,” read Neil Fligstein, “Rhétorique et réalités de la ‘mondialisation’,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 119 (September 1997): 36-47; on the ambivalent fas­ cination with America in the postwar period, Luc Boltanski, “America, America . . . Le Plan Marshall et l’importation du ‘management’,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 38 (June 1981): 19-41; and Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Atnericanization (Berke­ ley: University of California Press, 1993). This is not the only case where, by a paradox that displays one of the most typical effects of symbolic domination, a number of topics that the United States exports and imposes across the whole universe, begin­ ning with Europe, have been borrowed from those who now receive them as the most advanced forms of theory.

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For a bibliography on this sprawling debate, see Philosophy & Social Criticism 14, nos 3-4 (1988), special issue on “Universalism vs. Communitarianism: Contemporary Debates in Ethics.” H. L. A. Hart, “Rawls on Liberty and its Priority,” in Norman Daniels, ed., Reading Rawls: Critical Studies on Rawls’ “A Theory o f Justice” (New York: Basic Books, 1975), pp. 238-59. From this point of view, crudely sociological, the dialogue between Rawls and Habermas - about whom it is no exaggeration to say that they are structural similes, each within his own philosophical tradition - is highly significant (cf., for example, Jürgen Habermas, “Reconcili­ ation through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on Political Liberal­ ism,” Journal o f Philosophy 3 (1995): 109-31). According to the classic study of Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995 [1974]). Michael Hanchard, Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro o f Rio de Janeiro and Sào Paulo, 1945-1988 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). One could find a powerful antidote to ethnocentric poison on this subject in the comparative history of racial domination, which demonstrates that ethno-racial divisions'are closely linked to the social and political history of each country (and particularly to the history of symbolic struggles over official classification), with each state produc­ ing and reproducing the conception of “race” that fits the formation of its national compact. Alas, even studious efforts in this direction often end up projecting raw Americano-centric categories and thus effacing the very historical differences they are intended to highlight (for a paradigmatic example, see Anthony Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison o f the United States, South Africa and Brazil (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)). Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal o f Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975). Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Develop­ ment o f Brazilian Civilization (New York: Knopf, 1964 [1943]). How long will it be before we get a book entitled “Racist Brazil” pat­ terned after the book with a scientifically scandalous title, “Racist France,” of a French sociologist more attentive to the expectations of the journalistic field than to the complexities of social reality (Michel Wieviorka et al., La France raciste (Paris: Seuil, 1993))? Charles Wagley, “On the Concept of Social Race in the Americas,” in Dwight B. Heath and Richard N. Adams, eds., Contemporary Cultures and Societies in Latin America (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 531-45; also Richard Graham, ed., The Idea o f Race in Latin America, 1870-1940 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1980), and Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (London: Pluto Press, 1997).

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18 The anthropologist Marvin Harris famously elicited 492 “race-color terms” from 100 respondents by presenting to them two decks of 36 cards of drawings of men and women featuring permutations of three skin tones, three hair forms, and two lip sizes and nose widths (Marvin Harris, “Referential Ambiguity in the Calculus of Brazilian Racial Identity,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 26 (1970): 1-14). 19 Edward E. Telles, “Race, Class, and Space in Brazilian Cities,” Inter­ national journal o f Urban and Regional Research 19, no. 3 (Septem­ ber 1995): 395-406, and idem, “Residential Segregation by Skin Color in Brazil,” American Sociological Review 57, no. 2 (April 1992): 186-97; for a century-long overview, George Andrews Reid, Blacks and Whites in Säo Paulo, 1888-1988 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). 20 F. James Davis, Who is Black? One Nation’s Definition (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), and Joel Williamson, The New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1980). 21 Reynolds Farley, The New American Reality: Who We Are, How We Got There, Where We Are Going (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996), pp. 264-5. 22 James McKee shows in his masterwork, Sociology and the Race Problem: The Failure o f a Perspective (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), first, that these allegedly scientific theories borrow the stereotype of the cultural inferiority of blacks and, second, that they proved singularly incapable of predicting and then explaining the wide mobilization of the African-American community in the postwar decades culminating in the nationwide race riots of the 1960s. 23 This status of universal standard, of “Greenwich meridian” in relation to which all advances and lags, all “archaisms” and “modernisms” (the avant-garde) come to be evaluated, is one of the universal properties of those who symbolically dominate a given universe (cf. Pascale Casanova, La République mondiale des lettres (Paris: Seuil, 1999)). 24 Thomas Bender, “Politics, Intellect, and the American University, 1945-1995,” Daedalus 126 (Winter 1997): 1-38; on the importation of the theme of the ghetto in the recent French debate about the city and its ills, Loïc Wacquant, “Pour en finir avec le mythe des ‘citésghettos’: les différences entre la France et les Etats-Unis,” Annales de la recherche urbaine 52 (September 1992): 20-30. 25 One will find an exemplary description of the process of transfer of the power of consecration in avant-garde art from Paris to New York in the classic book by Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea o f Modern Art: Abstract Impressionism, Freedom and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

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Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth, “Droits de l’homme et philanthropie hégémonique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 121/2 (March 1998): 23-41. Enzo Mingione, ed., Urban Poverty and the Underclass: A Reader (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1996). This is not an isolated inci­ dent: as this article was going to press, the same publishing house was embroiled in a row with the urbanologists Ronald van Kempen and Peter Marcuse to try and get them to change the title of their joint work, The Partitioned City, into the more glitzy Globalizing Cities (they ended up publishing two volumes by these two titles but with two different publishers). Maria P. Root, ed., The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1995); Jon Michael Spencer, The New Colored People: The Mixed Race Movement in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997); and Kimber­ ley DaCosta, “Remaking ‘Race’: Social Bases and Implications of the Multiracial Movement in America” (doctoral thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2000). Howard Winant, “Racial Formation and Hegemony: Global and Local Developments,” in Racism, Modernity, and Difference: On the 'Western Front, ed. Ali Rattansi and Sallie Westwood (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1994), and idem. Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Com­ parisons (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). As John Westergaard already noted a few years back in his presidential address to the British Sociological Association (“About and Beyond the Underclass: Some Notes on the Influence of the Social Climate on British Sociology Today,” Sociology 26, no. 4 (July-September 1992): 575-87). Christopher Jencks and Paul E. Peterson, eds, The Urban Underclass (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1991), p. 3. Peterson closes this opening paragraph of the book by noting that Richard Wagner’s The Ring o f Niebelung best evokes the “underclass” as a “vile and debased subhuman population.” Just three examples among many: Theo Roeland and Justus Veenman, “An Emerging Ethnic Underclass in the Netherlands? Some Empirical Evidence,” New Community 19, no. 1 (October 1992): 129-41; Jens Dangschat, “Concentration of Poverty in the Landscapes of ‘Boomtown’ Hamburg: The Creation of a New Urban Underclass?,” Urban Studies 77 (August 1994): 1133-47; Christopher T. Whelm, “Margin­ alization, Deprivation, and Fatalism in the Republic of Ireland: Class and Underclass Perpectives,” European Sociological Review 12, no. 1 (May 1996): 33-51; and, for a ringing note of dissent, Enrico Pugliese, “La disoccupazione di massa e la questione de\Yunderclass,” La Critica Sociologica 117/18 (April-September 1996): 89-98. In taking considerable trouble to argue the obvious - viz., that the concept of “underclass” does not apply to French cities - Cyprien

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Avenel accepts and reinforces the preconceived notion that it has pur­ chase on urban reality in the United States in the first place (“La Ques­ tion de 1“underclass’ des deux côtés de l’Atlantique,” Sociologie du travail 39, no. 2 (April 1997): 211-37). As proposed by Nicolas Herpin, “L'underclass dans la sociologie améri­ caine: exclusion sociale et pauvreté,” Revue française de sociologie 34, no. 3 (July-September 1993): 421-39. Loïc Wacquant, “L"’underclass urbaine’ dans l’imaginaire social et scientifique américain,” in L’Exclusion. L’état des savoirs, ed. Serge Paugam (Paris: La Découverte, 1996), pp. 248-62. These differences have deep historical roots, as attested by a compara­ tive reading of the works of Giovanna Procacci and Michael Katz: Giovanna Procacci, Gouverner la misère. La question sociale en France, 1789-1848 (Paris: Seuil, 1993), and Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow o f the Poorhouse: A History o f Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, new edn 1997). Gunnar Myrdal, Challenge to Affluence (New York: Pantheon, 1963). Rick Fantasia, “Everything and Nothing: The Meaning of Fast-Food and Other American Cultural Goods in France,” The Tocqueville Review 15, no. 7 (1994): 57-88. “Embattled Minorities Around the Globe: Rights, Hopes, Threat,” Dissent (Summer 1996). The problem of language, evoked here in passing, is at once crucial and thorny. Knowing the precautions that ethnologists take in introducing indigenous words, one cannot but be surprised - although one is also well aware of all the symbolic profits that this veneer of “modernity” provides - that social scientists should stock their technical language with so many theoretical “faux amis” based on a mere lexicological fac­ simile (with minority becoming “minorité,” “profession”, etc.), without seeing that these morphologically twinned words are separated by the whole set of differences between the social and symbolic system in which they were produced and the new system in which they are inserted. Those most exposed to the “faux ami” fallacy are obviously the British, because they apparently speak the same language, but also because they have often learnt their sociology in American textbooks, “readers,” and books, and thus do not have much to oppose to such conceptual invasion, save extreme epistemological vigilance. (Of course, there exist strong centers of resistance to American hegemony, such as, for example in the case of ethnic studies, around the review Ethnic and Racial Studies, directed by Martin Bulmer, and around Robert Miles’s research group on racism and migration at the University of Glasgow. But these alternative paradigms, concerned with taking the specificities of the British ethno-racial order into full account, are of necessity no less defined by their opposition to American concepts and their British derivatives.) It follows that Great Britain is structurally predisposed to

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act as the Trojan horse by w hich the notions o f American scholarly com m on sense penetrate the European intellectual field (it is w ith intel­ lectual matters as with matters o f econom ic and social policy, and lately o f penal policy as well). It is in England that the activity o f conserva­ tive foundations and mercenary intellectuals has been established the longest and is the m ost sustained and the m ost effective. Proof is the diffusion there of the scholarly myth o f the “ underclass” as a result of the high-profile media interventions o f Charles Murray, expert o f the M anhattan Institute and intellectual guru o f the libertarian right in the United States, and o f its counterpart, the theme o f the “dependency” o f the dispossessed upon public aid, brought in by M urray’s ideologi­ cal sidekick, Lawrence M ead, w hich Tony Blair has proposed to reduce drastically in order to “free” the poor from the “y o k e” o f assistance, as Clinton did before for their American cousins in the summer o f 1996. Cf. notably Robert Erickson and John G oldthorpe, The Constant Flux: A Study o f Mobility in Industrial Societies (O xford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Erik O lin Wright arrives at much the same result w ith a notably different conceptualization and m ethodology in Class Counts: Com­ parative Studies in Class Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). O n the political determinants o f the scale o f inequalities in the United States and their increase over the past tw o decades, see Claude Fischer et al., Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). In a work essential for taking the full measure o f the w eight o f the his­ torical unconscious that survives, in a more or less m isrecognizable and repressed form, in the scholarly problematics o f a country and the historical gravity that gives American academic imperialism m uch of its extraordinary force o f im position, D orothy Ross reveals how the American social sciences (econom ics, sociology, political science, and psychology) were erected from the outset upon tw o com plem entary dogmas constitutive o f the national doxa: “m etaphysical individualism ” and the idea o f a diametrical opp osition between the dynam ism and elasticity o f the “n e w ” American order, on the one side, and the stag­ nation and rigidity o f “o ld ” European social form ations, on the other (Dorothy Ross, The Origins o f American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)). O ne finds direct retranslations of these tw o founding dogm as in the ostensibly purified idiom o f “grand” sociological theory: o f the first, in the canonical attem pt by Talcott Parsons to elaborate a “voluntaristic theory o f action ” and, more recently, in the resurgent popularity o f so-called rational-choice theory, and, o f the second, in the “theory o f m odernization” that reigned supreme over the study o f societal change in the three decades after World War II and that has recently made an unexpected return in postSoviet studies.

Key Writings of Pierre Bourdieu on Democratic Politics

This bibliography is intended as a short guide to the key writings of Pierre Bourdieu on democratic politics for readers who want to go beyond the texts contained in the present volume. References are listed in chronological order of initial publication; in the case of mul­ tiple translations and (re)printings, only the most accessible source in English is mentioned. On conceptualizing symbolic power and politics [1977] 1979. “Symbolic Power.” Critique o f Anthropology 13/14 (Summer): 77-85; reprinted in Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thomp­ son (Cambridge: Polity; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 163-70. [1979] 1984. “Culture and Politics.” Chapter 8 in Distinction: A Social Cri­ tique of the judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 397-465. [1980] 1990. “Modes of Domination.” Chapter 8, Book I, in The Logic o f Practice (Cambridge: Polity; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), pp. 122-34. 1986. “La science et l’actualité.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 61 (March): 2-3. 1988. “Penser la politique.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 71/2 (March): 2-3. [1997] 2000. “Symbolic Violence and Political Struggles.” Chapter 5 in Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), pp. 164-205.

200

KEY WRITINGS OF BOURDIEU

O n re p re s e n ta tio n , d e le g a tio n , and th e p o litic a l fie ld

[1971] 1993. “Public Opinion Does Not Exist.” In Sociology in Question (London: Sage Publications), pp. 149-57. [1980] 1990. “Identity and Representation: Elements for a Critical Reflec­ tion on the Idea of Region.” Chapter 10 in Language and Symbolic Power, pp. 220-8. [1981] 1990. “Political Representation: Elements for a Theory of the Polit­ ical Field.” Chapter 8 in Language and Symbolic Power, pp. 171-202. [1981] 1990. “Description and Prescription: The Conditions of Possibility and Limits of Political Effectiveness.” Chapter 5 in Language and Sym­ bolic Power, pp. 127-36. [1984] 1985. “Delegation and Political Fetishism.” Thesis Eleven 10/11 (November): 56-70; reprinted in Language and Symbolic Power, pp. 203-19. [1984] 1985. “Social Space and the Genesis of Groups.” Theory & Society 14-16 (November): 723-44; reprinted in Language and Symbolic Power, pp. 229-51.

O n th e s ta te and th e fie ld o f p o w e r

[1989] 1996. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field o f Power. Cam­ bridge: Polity; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. [1990] 2005. “The State and the Construction of the Market.” In The Social Structures o f the Economy (Cambridge: Polity; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). [1992] 1993. “Rethinking the State: On the Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field.” Sociological Theory 12, no. 1 (March): 1-19; abridged version reprinted in Practical Reasons, pp. 35-63. [1993] 1999. “The Abdication of the State.” In Pierre Bourdieu et al., The Weight o f the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Cam­ bridge: Polity; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), pp. 181-8. [1994] 1998. “The Soviet Variant and Political Capital,” and “Social Space and Field of Power.” In Practical Reasons: On the Theory o f Action (Cambridge: Polity; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), pp. 14-18 and 31-4. 1994. “Stratégies de reproduction et modes de domination.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 105 (December): 3-12.

O n in te lle c tu a ls and p o litic a l a c tio n

[1984] 1988. Homo Academicus. Cambridge: Polity; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

KEY W R IT IN G S OF BO URDIEU

201

[1986] 1990. “The Uses of ‘The People’.” Chapter 10 in In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, rev. edn. 1994), pp. 150-5. 1989. “The Corporatism of the Universal: The Role of Intellectuals in the Modern World.” Telos 81 (Fall): 99-110. [1998] 2000. Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market. London: Pluto Press. [2001 ] 2003. Firing Back: Agahist the Tyranny o f the Market 2. Cambridge: Polity. 2002. Interventions, 1961-2001. Science sociale et action politique, ed. Franck Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo. Montréal: Comeau & Nadeau.

Index

abbeys, elections 97 absolutism 6, 47 , 48 abstention 14, 5 8 -9 , 72, 106, 128 academic disciplines: American influence on 186, 1 9 0-1; hierarchy o f 1 3 8 -9 Academic Discourse (Bourdieu et al.) 69 academic field 142; American hegem ony 7, 1 8 2 -9 0 ; authoritarianism in 6 8 -9 ; autonom y o f the 71, 77; classification and consecration in 135, 1 3 8 -4 0 ; deconstruction o f sacred academic texts 7 1 -2 ; dem ocratization o f hierarchies 73; market criteria 7; orthodoxy 7 1 -2 ; see also elite schools; universities academics 21, 134; German 178; ivory tower 64, 76; schemata o f judgments 1 3 8 - 4 0 ,1 4 5 ; sym bolic colonization 7; see also intellectuals Achemenide Empire 37 ACRIM ED 82

Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 13, 7 1 -2 , 76

activists: anti-capitalist 84; and researchers 70 Adam Smith Institute 179 A dam ec, Ladislav 158 adm inistration: clerks and 46; and delegated authority 4 2 -3 ; and empire 37; nom inal differentiation o f French 45; patronage and clientele system 35; royal pow er and control o f 37, 4 2 , 44 administrative field: genesis o f the 4 8 -5 1 ; independent o f politics and o f the econ om y 48 affirmative action 185 African Americans 183, 184 agency: active and passive political 2, 72; differentiation o f pow er and 4 8 -5 1 ; as itself socially structured 137; m andated 6 0 -2 ; and structure dualism 6, 1 3 5 -8 aggregation, the logic o f 5, 5 7 -9 , 70, 92 , 95 agora 4 4 , 66 Alam , M uzaffar 34 alchemy, o f representation 4, 15, 1 2 0 , 1 4 6 -7 n Algeria 5, 18, 77, 78 , 83, 118, 133

IN D E X

Algerian War of Independence 12, 64, 66-8, 83, 111 Algerians, The (Bourdieu) 67 alienation 59 Allègre, Claude 79 Althusser, Louis 144 “American dream”, mythology of 179,188-9 American Revolution 93 Americanization 185 ancien régime, ballots in 6, 91-110 anthropology 12, 31; comparativehistorical of the ruling class 6, 135; economic 82-3; philosophical 20, 181-2; of power 133; presuppositions 181 “Appeal for the Autonomy of the Social Movement” 84 “Appeal for Estates General of the European Social Movement” 80, 83 ARESER see Association for Reflection on Higher Education and Research Argentina 4 Aristotle 46, 66, 178 army: militia as a state prorogative 45; shift from feudal to mercenary 40 Aron, Raymond 66, 68 artistic field 142; 19th-century France 16-17; money and the 77 artists, and capitalism 16-17 assemblies, popular 101, 102 Association for Reflection on Higher Education and Research (ARESER) 77-8 associations 13, 59, 77, 82 Assyria, ancient 37, 39 asylum rights 77 Athens 84 Augustine, Saint 46 authenticity, and seals 49 authority: American cultural 182-6; delegated and profit 42; development of forms

203

independent of kinship 36; dissociation of dynastic and bureaucratic 48-51; and efficacy of performative discourse 15; lengthening of chain of 48-50; of spokespersons 5, 60-2 autonomization: of bureaucratic field 29; of the political 94 autonomy: of elections 106; intellectual 19, 71, 77; of opinion 59; of political actors 153 Balkan War 83 ballots: in ancien régime 6, 91-110; secret 57, 102 Béarn, peasants of 31, 32, 67, 83, 133 belief 20; “speculative bubble” 34; in unchanging social technologies 94; web of 145-6 Benda, Julien 81 Benda, Vaclav 172-3 Berle, Adolph A. 36 Berlin Wall, fall of the 75, 76 bicameralism 93 Bloch, Marc 31, 41, 45 blood: as filiation (jura sanguinis) 36, 40; and merit 5 Blum, Léon 11 Bodin, Jean 46, 101 body (effets de corps), constituting a 96, 102, 105-7 Bonney, Richard J. 30, 35 Borda, Jean-Charles 93 Botero, Giovanni 46 Boucher, Dom Nicolas 97 Bourdieu, Pierre: attitude towards politics vii 11-12, 66-7, 68; compared with Foucault 6, 144-5; and democratic politics 10-28; “From the King’s House to the Reason of State” 29-54; media campaign against 81-2; methodology 2-3, 95; personal politics 11-13; political activism 5, 18, 64-90; on public opinion

204

IN D E X

Bourdieu (cont’d) 15-16, 69-70, 114-16; as sociologically political 1, 13, 111-12, 135-8; sociology of culture 133-5; on symbolic power 133-50; “The Cunning of Imperialist Reason” 178-98; “The Mystery of Ministry” 5, 55-63; see also capital; domination; doxa; field; habitus; symbolic power; reflexivity; bourgeoisie: and academic elite 138-40; bourgeois culture 134-5; diverse forms of capital 141-2, 144; embourgeoisement 189; hegemony of 144-6; political judgments of 14 Brazil: American research domination 185, 187; racial differences in 182, 183-4, 185, 187 Brookings Institution 179 bureaucracy: from the colleges 46; legitimized by academic credentials 74; magical efficacy of 48; on model of the family or king’s ministers 49; of pariahs 37, 38-9; recruitment 39 bureaucratic field 3, 17, 50; autonomization of 29; constraints of the 43; as a field of power 51; inventions of the 48; model of genesis 29-54; see also administrative field bureaucratic state: and lengthening of the chain of legitimation 17; mode of management and reproduction 34; tied to education 40; transition from the dynastic state to 5, 29-54 bureaucratization, logic of 43-8 Calfa, Marian 158 Canada 4 Canguilhem, Georges 12 canon law 46 Capetians 36

capital: accumulation and concentration of statist 43; accumulation of the house (maison) 30; concentration and global economic space 83; differentiation of forms 144-5; forms of and class rule 6, 135-6; hereditary transmission 17; inherited and matrix of preferences 141-2; initial accumulation of 33-4, 41; modes of reproduction of 17; and power 16, 61, 144; and relations of force 153; schoolmediated acquisition 17, 51; scientific 18; see also cultural capital; economic capital; social capital; symbolic capital capitalism: and the artist 16-17; “fiscal” 51; Marx on 118; modernization of French 71; political making of institutions of 83 capitalist class 145-6 Capuchin Order 106 Carnogursky, Jan 168, 170, 173 Cassirer, Ernst 135 caste system 67, 184 Castile, war of succession (1474-79) 32 categories 3, 95, 138; application of US racial to others 182-4, 185, 187, 191; internalized of judgment 15, 141; racial 182-4; state-sanctioned mental 17 censorship 4, 43, 72, 189 Center for European Sociology (CSE) 68, 69 Center for the Sociology of Education and Culture (CSEC) 68-9 Chambre des comptes 45 champ see field Champagne, Patrick vii 6, 111-32 charisma 31, 133, 140 Charle, Christophe 77

IN D E X

Cheruel, Histoire de l’administration monarchique en France 33 China, ancient 44 choice: classification in 137; compared with election 107; individual 92-3; problem of 59, 62 Christin, Olivier vii 6, 91-110 Church: elections 97-9; medieval 134; state modeled on the 46 Church, William Farr 47 CISIA see International Committee of Support for Algerian Intellectuals civil servants 40, 41, 45-6, 47, 50-1, 142; and disinterestedness 43; educational institutions for 141; familial interests 50 civil society 26n, 37, 43, 45-7, 59, 61, 65, 66, 74, 75, 83, 95-6, 118-19, 167 class: differentiation, and cultural products and practices 134-5; inequality, contribution of culture to 13, 69; relations, reproduction through educational system 135; rule, new forms of 4, 134-5; structure: reproduction of 143, transformation of 111; upper class, intellectual and business fractions 139 classification 17, 137, 148n, 187-9; and consecration 138-40; defining taste 134 clergy, French 101-2, 105 clerks 45-6, 49 clientelism 35, 41, 75 Cluny Abbey 97 co-optation 92, 93, 99 collective decision 93, 95-6, 100-1, 106 collective decision-making: history of 92-6; majority voting as legitimate 101; and social reproduction 92

205

collectine intellectual 19, 75-8, 80; reinventing a 75-8 collectives, symbolic fabrication of 15, 56-62, 70 collectivism 181 Collège de France 73 College of European Artists and Scholars 76 colonial war, and revolutionary consciousness 66-8, 78 Comenius 172 Commission for the Contents of Education 73 commitment, scholarship with 5, 64-90 Committee for the Defense and Renewal of the French University 68

commodification 18, 180 Common Observance 97-9 “common places” 13, 178-9 communication: instruments to be negotiated 62; public opinion and development of 117-19; specialists in political 122; technocracy of 75; to foster institution of the universal 76 communicative action, and ethics 28n communism: dealing with the legacy of 164-7; demise of 155; transition out of 155-7, 158-61, 164-5, 171; see also reform communism Communist Party: Czechoslovak 160; French 12; Slovak 160; successors of 157-74 communitarianism, liberalism vs. 181-2 competency 16, 35, 37, 40; assumption of citizens’ equal political 115-16;and heredity 5, 40; lay professional 45; specialist and technical 39 concepts: import-export strategies 7, 179, 182-90; in social struggle 120; use in creating reality 47,

206

IN D E X

critique 75, 76, 95, 126-8, 191 concepts (cont’d) Crouzer, Denis 41 120, 182-9; use of historical 95; crown, as a principle of sovereignty see also Bourdieu, core concepts; 36 folk concepts cultural capital 14, 16, 72; conditions of possibility: for debate differences in amount 59; and denied by polling 128; economic economic capital 135, 142-4; and cultural of democratic opposed by political capital 155, practice 14, 21; expert 167; principle of domination knowledge and 93; see also 142; in school system 69, 113 social conditions of possibility cultural imperialism 7, 178-98 Condorcet, Marquis de 93 cultural pluralism 7, 19, 179 connivance 59-60 cultural production: class conscience, universal 77 differentiation and 134-5; consecration: and classification commercial constraints on 77; 138-40, 144, 184-5; rites of 31 diffusion of 179-80, 184-92 conservatism: and public opinion Cultural Studies 186, 190 120; reconverted 13; social culture: contribution to class movements as resistance to inequality 13, 69, 134-5; 82-4; think tanks 80, 83, 180 museums, access to European “conservative revolution”, media as , 68, 112; and politics 1, 13, 66, servant of the 81-4 78; as a product and weapon 21; constructivism 136-8 sociology of 134-5 consumerism 57, 79 Czech Republic: liberal and contracts theory, modeled as a conservative split 164-7; game 42-3 coronation 31, 92 political parties 160; right-wing corporation: and bourgeois political strategy 157, 161-7; education 135; as collective mind and Slovakia 7, 151-77 56; emergence of the 47, 96, Czechoslovakia, former: compared 101-3; governed by rules 106-7; with Hungary 158; paradox of ordinary members of 61 split 174; political field 151-77; corporations (business): and chief round-table negotiations 152, executive officers 142; 158-61; secret police (STB) 165, multinational 83; ownership and 166 management 36 corporatism 56, 76-7 Davidson, Donald 137 “Corporatism of the Universal” de Gaulle, Charles 111, 118, 121 (Bourdieu) 76-7 debate, public 64, 65, 128; on Corrigan, Philip 45 effectiveness of polling 113, court 43-4 122-4, 127-8; monopoly of courtesy 46 political professionals over 75 Craft o f Sociology, The (Bourdieu decision-making: economic 95-6; et al.) 55 effects of opinion polls on 121, credentials: bureaucracy and 125-6; history of collective academic 17, 74, 140, 148n; and 92-6; majority 6, 9 3 -4 , 100-3, property title 5; “state magic” of 101; modes of 94 146; university 69 defeudalization 4 4-5

IN D E X

definitions 95, 120; game of preliminary 179, 181; social 120; use in domination 184 delegation 5, 10, 14; authorized 60-2, 70; the circuit of 48-51; and collective action 60-2; and collective decision-making 95-6; dispossession through 69-72; to institutions 59; and profit from intermediary position 42; symbolic power of 158-60 democracy: Bourdieu’s views on 2, 21; broad definition 10; formal and real 112-14; deliberative, and quest for cultural recognition 20-1; direct, polls as substitute for 113; liberal vision of 57, 59; and network of technocratic social structures 146; presupposes spaces of debate 128; “racial” 182; radical historicization of 2-3, 94-5; Western models of 157; see also deliberative democracy; direct democracy democratic politics: Bourdieu’s model of 4-5, 10-28; in Bourdieu’s work 13-18 democratic practice: economic and cultural conditions of possibility 14, 21; social conditions of possibility 2, 10, 14, 21, 62, 112-14; and symbolic power 1-9 democratic struggles 4; education and 134-5; implications of Bourdieu’s theories for 18-21 democratization: of academic hierarchies 73; of education 112; of sociology 112 demonstrations 15, 16, 60; Nice (2000) 83; novel forms of 70; Québec City (2001) 83; see also protest denegation (Verneinung) 21, 48, 181-2 depoliticization, by politicalscientization 71, 188-9

207

deregulation, economic 13, 18, 188-9 Derrida, Jacques 77 Despinac, Pierre 102 dialectics 47, 62 Dieppe 100 Discepolo, Thierry viii 5, 64-90 discourse 6; academic 69; efficacy of performative 15; with philosophical pretensions 181-5; power re Foucault 145; space of political strategies 154; of urban elites 100 discrimination 18 disenchantment, political 72-5, 81-2, 128 disinterestedness 17, 43, 48, 74 disposition 3, 19-20, 49; antiinstitutional of B. 12; of bourgeoisie in education 138-40, 141; of clerks 46; effects of 43; and position 19-20, 136 dispossession 14, 69-72 Dissent 191 dissidence 58, 155, 158-60, 164-7 distinction 20, 103-5 Distinction, “Culture and Politics” (Bourdieu) 14, 134 domination 16, 133; clashes between different categories of 17; colonial structure of 67-8, 182; cultural 185-6; division of labor of 5, 16-17, 36-8, 40, 42, 51; economic 80, 142; gender 27n; hidden springs of 70-2; and ideology 4, 13-14; legitimation through education 68-9, 134-5; of neoliberalism 59, 71, 180; by paternal power 30, 31, 34-5, 43-4; racial in US 182-5; rationalization of 4, 19, 35, 46; relations of 20, 83, 154; symbolic 19, 112, 133, 135-6, 145-6, 184-5, 193n; technocratic mode 75, 79, 135, 146; by vested interests 93

208

IN D E X

doxa 20, 71; acceptance of the status quo 20; democratic of the moment 120; “doxosophists” 66, 71; and the future 20; globalization of themes of American social 182-9; neoliberal 80; new intellectual 192n Dubcek, Alexander 159, 168 Du by, Georges 46 Durkheim, Emile 11, 70, 112, 135; Leçons de sociologie 56, 95-6 dynastic principle 35-6, 48, 50 dynastic state 30; ambiguity of 30, 42; conflation of public and private orders 43; eunuchs 37, 38; intra-dynastic struggles 36-7; matrimonial strategies 32; and person of the king 41; and private appropriation of public resources by a few 41-2; reproduction strategies 33, 38, 40; royal commission 45; royal family 31, 36, 37; scribes 37, 39-40; specific contradictions of the 34-4 0 ; the specificity of the 31-4; transition to bureaucratic state 5, 29-54 Eastern Europe: polarization 6-7, 151, 157, 174 Ecole des hautes études commerciales 141 Ecole nationale d’administration (ENA) 141 Ecole normale supérieure 80, 138, 141 Ecole pratique des hautes études 68 economic action, political action as 57-8, 70 economic capital 14, 16, 43; and cultural capital 135, 142-4; domination by 80, 142; private appropriation of 50 economics, neo-marginalist theory 181; in post-Communist societies 157, 161-2, 171; scholastic fallacy in 83

economy: administrative field independent of the 48; centralism 170-2; mixed 157; social and political foundations of the 82-3 education 18, 67; Bourdieu’s engagement with 73; boursiers 38-9; construction of the social world 17; crisis of system 111; cultural capital in selection 113; democratization of 112; and development of the bureaucratic state 40, 44 -5 ; and domination in democratic age 134-5; and equality of opportunity 111-12; generalization of access to 20; “liberating schools” 112,113, 129n; and the legitimation of domination 68-9; as a mode of reproduction 4 4 -5 ; opinion survey on 114; quality of teaching 73; social origins and educational success 69; and social reproduction 139-40; symbolic power in 134-5; system as a cognitive machine 139; and universal suffrage 118; vouchers for 57, 70; see also higher education; schools efficiency 3 Egypt, ancient 37 elections 6, 15, 16; autonomy of 106; Q teaux Abbey 97-9, 105; Czechoslovak (1990) 158-61; defined 106; electoral campaigns, and pre-election polls 122-4, 126, 128; electoral duty 106; electoral practices, double historicization of 91-110; formalities 106-7; local religionbased 105; prediction by pre­ election polls 121, 124; right of 91; social uses of 94; strategies in Czechoslovak politics 152, 158-74; two conceptions of 92-4; versus choice 107; weight of institutions in 98-9, 102-3, 106; see also voting

INDEX

elective affinities, of academic elite 138-40 electoral colleges: narrowness of 99; stabilization of 101 Elias, Norbert 33, 46 elite schools: and class domination 135, 141-6; field of power and social space 138, 142-6; legitimation of political and economic power 6; political import 69; prépas 139-40; reproduction of the field of power 74, 139-40; Science-Po (Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris) 114, 130n; social topology of 141 elites: academic 138-40, 145; collective decision-making 92 Elizabeth, Queen 50 empires: agrarian 37, 39; compared with feudalism 38, 43; legitimating function of center 34; see also imperial power; imperialism empirical research 12, 71-2, 147n engagement, intellectual autonomy and political 5, 19, 21, 64-90 Engels, Friedrich 58 England: 17th-century 30; common law 45; evolution of practices re royal seals 49-50; sheriffs in 45 Enlightenment 75-6 equality of opportunity 111-12 equality under the law 112, 146 Esprit 67, 79 Estates General of the Social Movement 80, 83 Etats généraux 47, 92 ethnicity: ethnic fragmentation 21; Ethnic Studies 190; ethnocentrism 31, 182 ethnology 31, 67 ethnomethodology 136 Europe: integration 18, 83; politics (1330-1650) 30; state retrenchment 5; struggles in 75-8

209

European Commission 179 European Trade Union Confederation 84 European Union: diffusion of American research traditions 185-6; formation of 75-8 evolutionism 14 exclusion 68, 188-9 “exit”, or “voice” 57, 61 “experts”, influence of 19, 71, 80 expression, mode of production of opinion distinguished from mode of 21, 56-7, 59-62, 96, 101 Eyal, Gil viii 6-7, 151-77 feudalism 30-4, 38, 41-2, 45; compared with empires 38, 43 field 3, 4, 14, 18, 50; concept of 152-3; dialectic with habitus 3, 136-8; obliteration of structure by random selection 58 field analysis 154 field of power 4, 5, 6, 50; American 178-98; between king and Parlement 47-8; Bourdieu's theory of 15-17, 74; the bureaucratic field as a 50-1; and conflict between modes of reproduction 40; differentiation of 50, 144-5; and elite schools 138, 141; post-Communist 155-7; social space and field of elite schools 142-6; see also bureaucratic field; field of power; journalistic field; juridical field; political field Figaro, Le 117 financial organization 42, 44 Flaubert, Gustave 133 flexibilité (employability) 80, 180 folk concepts, American 7, 183-7, 191 Foucault, Michel 19, 73; “bio­ power” 145; compared with Bourdieu 6, 144-5; disciplinary society 145

208

IN D E X

doxa 20, 71; acceptance of the status quo 20; democratic of the moment 120; “doxosophists” 66, 71; and the future 20; globalization of themes of American social 182-9; neoliberal 80; new intellectual 192n Dubcek, Alexander 159, 168 Duby, Georges 46 Durkheim, Emile 11, 70, 112, 135; Leçons de sociologie 56, 95-6 dynastic principle 35-6, 48, 50 dynastic state 30; ambiguity of 30, 42; conflation of public and private orders 43; eunuchs 37, 38; intra-dynastic struggles 36-7; matrimonial strategies 32; and person of the king 41; and private appropriation of public resources by a few 41-2; reproduction strategies 33, 38, 40; royal commission 45; royal family 31, 36, 37; scribes 37, 39-40; specific contradictions of the 34-40; the specificity of the 31-4; transition to bureaucratic state 5, 29-54 Eastern Europe: polarization 6-7, 151, 157, 174 Ecole des hautes études commerciales 141 Ecole nationale d’administration (ENA) 141 Ecole normale supérieure 80, 138, 141 Ecole pratique des hautes études 68 economic action, political action as 57-8, 70 economic capital 14, 16, 43; and cultural capital 135, 142-4; domination by 80, 142; private appropriation of 50 economics, neo-marginalist theory 181; in post-Communist societies 157, 161-2, 171; scholastic fallacy in 83

economy: administrative field independent of the 48; centralism 170-2; mixed 157; social and political foundations of the 82-3 education 18, 67; Bourdieu’s engagement with 73; boursiers 38-9; construction of the social world 17; crisis of system 111; cultural capital in selection 113; democratization of 112; and development of the bureaucratic state 40, 44-5; and domination in democratic age 134-5; and equality of opportunity 111-12; generalization of access to 20; “liberating schools” 112,113, 129n; and the legitimation of domination 68-9; as a mode of reproduction 44-5; opinion survey on 114; quality of teaching 73; social origins and educational success 69; and social reproduction 139-40; symbolic power in 134-5; system as a cognitive machine 139; and universal suffrage 118; vouchers for 57, 70; see also higher education; schools efficiency 3 Egypt, ancient 37 elections 6, 15, 16; autonomy of 106; Cîteaux Abbey 97-9, 105; Czechoslovak (1990) 158-61; defined 106; electoral campaigns, and pre-election polls 122-4, 126, 128; electoral duty 106; electoral practices, double historicization of 91-110; formalities 106-7; local religionbased 105; prediction by pre­ election polls 121, 124; right of 91; social uses of 94; strategies in Czechoslovak politics 152, 158-74; two conceptions of 92-4; versus choice 107; weight of institutions in 98-9, 102-3, 106; see also voting

INDEX

elective affinities, of academic elite 138-40 electoral colleges: narrowness of 99; stabilization of 101 Elias, Norbert 33, 46 elite schools: and class domination 135, 141-6; field of power and social space 138, 142-6; legitimation of political and economic power 6; political import 69; prépas 139-40; reproduction of the field of power 74, 139-40; Science-Po (Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris) 114, 130n; social topology of 141 elites: academic 138-40, 145; collective decision-making 92 Elizabeth, Queen 50 empires: agrarian 37, 39; compared with feudalism 38, 43; legitimating function of center 34; see also imperial power; imperialism empirical research 12, 71-2, 147n engagement, intellectual autonomy and political 5, 19, 21, 64-90 Engels, Friedrich 58 England: 17th-century 30; common law 45; evolution of practices re royal seals 49-50; sheriffs in 45 Enlightenment 75-6 equality of opportunity 111-12 equality under the law 112, 146 Esprit 67, 79 Estates General of the Social Movement 80, 83 Etats généraux 47, 92 ethnicity: ethnic fragmentation 21; Ethnic Studies 190; ethnocentrism 31, 182 ethnology 31, 67 ethnomethodology 136 Europe: integration 18, 83; politics (1330-1650) 30; state retrenchment 5; struggles in 75-8

209

European Commission 179 European Trade Union Confederation 84 European Union: diffusion of American research traditions 185-6; formation of 75-8 evolutionism 14 exclusion 68, 188-9 “exit”, or “voice” 57, 61 “experts”, influence of 19, 71, 80 expression, mode of production of opinion distinguished from mode of 21, 56-7, 59-62, 96, 101 Eyal, Gil viii 6-7, 151-77 feudalism 30-4, 38, 41-2, 45; compared with empires 38, 43 field 3, 4, 14, 18, 50; concept of 152-3; dialectic with habitus 3, 136-8; obliteration of structure by random selection 58 field analysis 154 field of power 4, 5, 6, 50; American 178-98; between king and Parlement 47-8; Bourdieu’s theory of 15-17, 74; the bureaucratic field as a 50-1; and conflict between modes of reproduction 40; differentiation of 50, 144-5; and elite schools 138, 141; post-Communist 155-7; social space and field of elite schools 142-6; see also bureaucratic field; field of power; journalistic field; juridical field; political field Figaro, Le 117 financial organization 42, 44 Flaubert, Gustave 133 flexibilité (employability) 80, 180 folk concepts, American 7, 183-7, 191 Foucault, Michel 19, 73; “bio­ power” 145; compared with Bourdieu 6, 144-5; disciplinary society 145

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IN D E X

foundations 7, 185, 187; Rockefeller Foundation 185, 187 fragmentation 7, 19, 21 France: administrative development (11th to 18th centuries) 45; Communist-led resistance to German occupation 11; Fifth Republic 12, 118-19; first presidential election by universal suffrage 113, 118, 121, 122; Fourth Republic 117-18; Fronde 47; as a nation-state 30; reasons for initial rejection of polling 116-19; strikes (1995) 64; Third Republic education system 39 France Culture 82 France-Soir 121 François des Maisons 106 French Institute for Public Opinion (IFOP) 116, 121 French Political Science Association, Bourdieu’s paper to (1973) 70 French Revolution (1789) 6, 51, 146 Freyre, Gilberto 182 Friedman, Milton 57, 70 “From the King’s House to the Reason of State” (Bourdieu) 29-54 Garelli, Paul 37, 39 Garfinkel, Harold 136 Gaxie, Daniel 18 genealogy, as principle of legitimation 32, 40; genealogical narrative 29 General Estates (1614-15) 47, 92 “general will” 60, 62, 101, 105-7; constructing the 55-63, 101, 105-7 Germany 4, 30; academics 178; domination of philosophy 181-2; Protestants and Catholics in wars of religion 94; reunification of 76

“ghetto” 189; ghettoization, of immigrant neighborhoods 180, 189 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 13 Glissant, Edouard 77 globalization 7, 19, 179, 180; neoliberal 13, 83; of themes of American doxa 182-9 Goodman, Nelson 140 grandes écoles see élite schools Greece 4; ancient 44, 94 Gros-Bourdieu Commission, “Principles for a Reflection on the Contents of Instruction” 73 group: decision-making 95-6; membership 59-60, 106; mode of existence and political action 56, 59-60; reduced to aggregate 57-8, 70; and representative 5, 55, 59-62; solidarity 139-40; symbolic fabrication of 15-16, 56-62, 70 Guénée, Bernard 39 Guicciardini, Francesco 46 guild masters 92, 99 Gulf War (1991) 81, 83 Habermas, Jürgen 28n, 76 habitus 3, 18, 19-20; concept of 136-7; dialectic with field 3, 136-8; genesis of a rationalbureaucratic 46; maladjustment between world and 20; passions of the dominated 20; preferences, matrix of 141-2; scholarly and political 189-90; social genesis of the economic 83; social sensitivity 137; subjectivity 3 Habsburg dynasty 32 Halimi, Serge, Les Nouveaux Chiens de garde 81 Hamelin, 91, 92 Hanchard, Michael, Orpheus and Power 182 Hanley, Sarah 47-8 Havel, Vâclav 160, 163-4

IN D E X

Heidegger, Martin 55, 133 Henri III 97 heredity 16, 38, 40; and competency 5, 16, 40 hierarchy: of academic disciplines 138- 9; academic and social 73, 139- 40; of consecrated research objects 72; and reciprocity 50; schools and social 134-5 higher education 77, 79; exclusion from 68; probability of access to 112

Hirschman, Albert 57 historical context, neutralization of 178-9 historical process, logic of the 29-54 historicization: dehistoricization 179, 191-2; double of electoral practices 91-110; neutralization, of historical context 178-9; radical 2-3, 8n, 94-5; rehistoricization, of apparently timeless institutions 94 historiography 5, 96 history: the “end” of 179; historical contingency 56; incarnate in bodies 136; objectified in things 136 Hobbes, Thomas 55 Holy Scripture 46 Homo Academicus (Bourdieu) 73 homosexuals 79 house, dynastic representation of the 30-40, 45 housing policy, French 82, 133 human rights: during Communism 157, 166; juridical and moral categories of 185 Humboldt, Alexander von 181 Hungary 151, 158 Hüsak, Gustav 170-1, 174 Husserl, Edmund 77 identity 7, 19; and “race” 182; see also group ideology 18; democratic 111; dominant 4, 13-14; of the gift or

21 I

talent 69; ideas, “received” 65; neoliberal of competition 74; polarization of political 161-74; political 152-4; social philosophy 13; use of word 27n; see also race; ruling-class ideology IFOP see French Institute for Public Opinion immigrant neighborhoods, ghettoization of 180, 189 immigration: migration 20-1; policy 79; urban poverty and segregation 188-9 imperialism: cultural 12, 178-98; effects of economic 180 “import-export” conceptual strategies 7, 179, 186-7, 190-1 India, Mughal Empire of Northern 34 individual action, logic of 57-8 individualism 181, 198n inequalities: of ability 112-13, 115; American urban and racial 179, 188-9; contribution of culture to class 13, 69, 134-5; and neoliberal “newspeak” 19; power of educational system to legitimate 69, 111-12; structural 134 Inheritors, The (Bourdieu) 68, 69, 112, 113 insecurity, social 20, 80, 180 Institut d’études politiques de Paris institutions: academie 68-9, 138-40; Bourdieu’s treatment of official 12, 13-18; delegation to 59; governmental 35; international 83, 179; mediation of power and privilege by educational 142-3; rehistoricization of apparently timeless 94; rites of 15; total 139; weight in elections 98-9, 102-3, 106

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IN D E X

intellectuals: and activists 70-2; Algerian 78; American domination 7, 182-90; and civic engagement and autonomy 5, 19, 64-90; collective intellectual 19, 75-8, 80; and cultural imperialism 178-98; European 180-1; ideological illusions of 133; “International of the” 77; journalist 81-4; left 69; media 64, 66, 78; need for reflexivity 21; as opinion-makers 6, 11; political power and autonomy 71; in post-Communist societies 157, 160, 161-7, 168, 169; prey to American universalization 185-7; profit motives 184; role in democratic struggles 19, 77; role in Soviet society 155; scholarship, with commitment 5, 64-90; social and political conditions of political action by 75; sociology of 70-3; “specific” 19; “total” 19; view of opinion polls 123; see also academic field; academics intentionality 137 interest, the general 75, 106 interest groups, construction of public opinion by 116, 120 interests 59, 133; disjuncture between class and individual in education 143-4; dissociation of private and public 50-1; of the dominant 93; institutions and 59; and strategies of universalization 17, 48, 178-98; submission of individual to corporate 102-3; transposed into political field 154; vested and genesis of the state 41-2, 49 International Committee of Support for Algerian Intellectuals (CISIA) 78 International Monetary Fund 83 international organizations 83, 179 International Parliament of Writers 77, 78

internationalism 7, 76 “invisible hand” myth 60, 92, 106 Islam, and rule of law 78 Italian principalities 44 Japan 45 Jaruzelski, Wojciech Witold 72-3 Jaurès, Jean 11 Jospin, Lionel 73, 80 journalistic field 18, 180, 190; critique of the 81-4 journalists 64, 66, 8 1 -4 , 114; political 126-7; reaction to pre-election polls 121, 123-4, 125, 126; as spokesmen of the “people” 126; sociologistjournalists 190 Juppé, Alain Marie 79 juridical field 47 juridical principle 36, 47, 48, 50 ju rists'30, 40, 46-7, 51, 107 Kabylia 31, 67 Kant, Immanuel 135 Kantorowicz, Ernst 32, 36 K avan,Jan 165-6 king: and ancien régime elections 92, 100; as arbiter 3 3-4; as embodiment of the state 32, 41, 43; favorites 35, 39; as “head of the house” 30, 32-3; king’s brothers and king’s ministers 37, 40; kingship, as a magistrature 46; and ministerial responsibility 49-50; monarchies, European 30-40; mythology of two bodies 32; symbolic capital of the 3 3 -4 , 42; and Treasury 37; see also court; dynastic state kinship relations: and dynasty 31, 36; state in opposition to 44 Klaus, Vaclav 159, 161-5, 171, 174 knowledge: instruments of and construction of reality 134-5; mathematical and statistical 93; restructuring divisions of 73;

IN D E X

sociology of 135; transmission of 112

Komarek, Valtr 159 Lacroix, Bernard 18 Laffont, Jean-Jacques 42 language: “faux amis” 192, 197n; of law 35; neoliberal lingua franca see “newspeak”; traps of history in 76; political code­ words 180; presuppositions, of discussion 178-9,181-2; rhetoric of representivity 6; semiotics 137; sociological pragmatics 15; technical terms, universal diffusion of 179-80; uses of 15, 47, 181-2; watchwords 60, 61

Language and Symbolic Power (Bourdieu) 15 law 35, 45-6; legal manuals 93; rule of 26n, 75; see also juridical field Le Goff, Jacques 49 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel 51 Lebenswelt, as a practical achievement 136 left-wing politics 11-12, 75, 142, 154; intellectuals 191; libertarian vs. governmental 13; Slovak 157, 161, 168-74 legitimation: of bureaucracy by academic credentials 74; of domination through education 68-9, 135; lengthening of the chain of 17, 48-51, 143-4; of merit 16, 140; principle and domination 16 Lewis, Andrew W. 31 Liber 75-6 Liber-Raisons d’Agir 13, 80-2, 116 liberal democracy: class domination in 146; crisis of faith in politics 128; popular voice in 15, 58-9; role of intellectuals in 21 liberalism: decision-making 95-6; economic 93; and socialism 76;

213

and voting 56-7, 70-2; vs. communitarianism 181-2 lobby 116, 117 logic, scholastic 46 Logic of Practice, The (Bourdieu) 83 Loiseau 46 Love of Art, The (Bourdieu) 68, 112

Lukâcs, Georg 134 lustration 165-6, 167, 171, 172-4 Machiavelli, Niccolô 135 magistrature 46, 47, 99, 105 “Maisons de la culture” 111 Maitland, F. W., Constitutional History of England 49 majoritarian principle: and individual voting 6, 93-4, 101; legitimate limits of 103-5 majorities: “silent” 119; majority decision, paradoxes of 93, 101 Manet, Edouard 133 marginal groups 40, 189; see also race market: deregulation 13, 18, 188-9; logic of the 3, 57-8, 59, 70, 79, 81, 83 marketing, political 124-6, 127-8 Markus, Jozef 169 marriage, dynastic 30, 31, 32 Marshall Plan 180 Marx, Karl 3, 118, 135; The Communist Manifesto 146 master-servant pattern 35 Means, Gardiner C. 36 Meciar, Vladimir 168-74 media: commercial pressures 18, 82; debate on polling 123, 127-8; dominant 81-2; intellectuals 64, 66, 78; intersection with political field 190; public radio 82; servant of the “conservative revolution” 81-4; and universalization 179; use by politicians 117-18; use of polls 125

214

IN D E X

mental structures, and social structures 6, 17, 20, 29, 136-8, 141-6, 148n merit 35, 40, 69, 143, 146; and blood 5; legitimation of 16, 140 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 137 Middle Ages: fusion of economic group and sovereignty group 31, 41; majoritarian decision-making 101; symbolic confrontations 16 Mingione, Enzo 186 ministers: homines novi 37, 38-9; responsibility for the acts of the king 49-50; see also mysterium o f ministerium (mystery of the ministry) minority 7, 101; active minorities 119; concept of 191; language rights 169; in US 182-90 Misère du Monde, La (Bourdieu) 13 Mitterrand, François 12, 73 mobilization 60-1; new forms of 84; of the sans 13, 80; signs 60, 62; of survey-takers 119 model, global American 7, 179, 180, 182-5 modernism 180 modernization theory 198n Monde diplomatique. Le S3 Monde, Le 74, 76, 79, 82, 117, 126 monetarism 157, 159, 162-3, 171, 172 money: and the arts 77; and the media 82 Mongol Empire 37 monopoly, law of (Elias) 33 moral panics 180 morality 75; “academic” 139; moralism 180; politics reduced to 181, 185 Morrison, Toni 77 Mousnier, Roland 35 multiculturalism 7, 19, 27n; uses of term 179 Myrdal, Gunnar 189

mysterium o f ministerium (mystery of the ministry) 5, 15, 55-63, 61 “Mystery of Ministry, The” (Bourdieu) 5, 55-63 mythology: of the “American dream” 179, 188-9; of the “general will” 60; of the “invisible hand” 60, 92, 106; of king’s two bodies 32 Nantes, Edict of (1598) 105 National Front (France) 74 nationalism 27n 76 naturalness, illusion of 55 negation see denegation (Verneinung) neo-Kantianism 112 neoliberalism 4, 11; effects of policies 75, 111; globalization 13, 180; ideology of competition 74; “newspeak” 7, 18, 19, 134; resistance to 78-81 Netherlands 185 neutrality: appearance of polls 126; “axiological” 64, 67 newspapers: control of 82; and opinion polls 117, 121, 126-7; readers’ letters 58-9 “newspeak”, neoliberal 7,18,19, 134 Nivelle, Pierre 97 nobility: of blood 40; “business” 142, 149n; clericalization of 45; demilitarized 45; feudal 30, 45; financial advantage 41; and king’s favorites 35, 39; noblesse de robe 40, 51; state 69, 74, 79, 133-50; as symbolic capital 30 nomination 10, 17, 92, 107, 153; authoritative 15, 45, 60-2 Normans 49 Nouveaux chiens de garde (Bourdieu) 81 objectivity 3; appearance of polls 126; scientific and “axiological” neutrality 64

IN D E X

OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) 179 Offerlé, Michel 18 official institutions, Bourdieu’s treatment of 12, 13-18 oligarchy: dynastic 41-3; social reproduction in 99-100 On Television (Bourdieu) 81 “ontological complicity” (Merleau-Ponty) 137 opinion: collective as fabrication of “general will” 15-16, 55-63, 101-2; collective as statistical aggregation of individual opinions 57-9, 62, 70, 92; and differences in amount of cultural capital 59, 115-16; mode of expression distinguished from mode of production 56-7, 59-62, 96, 101; professional managers of 66, 71, 125-6; “publicized” 60-1; secondary analysis of studies 114-15; social processes, in opinion formation and decision-making 96-100; see also public opinion opinion polls 3, 4, 6, 15-16, 58, 113, 126; debate on effectiveness of 122-4; early studies 116-17; expanding market for 113, 124-6; legitimation effect 124; non-responses 14, 70, 115; political critique and scientific critique 126-8; political uses and social effects of 15-16, 69-72, 74, 113, 124; predictive effect 124; presuppositions in 115-16; reliability of technology of 113, 116, 123; scientific credentials of 127; social uses and reactions to 111-32; use of statistics 120 opposition, political 152-4, 155-7, 158-60 Ottoman Empire 37, 38, 39

Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu) 83

215

“palace wars” 16, 36, 40 Paris 68, 79; apothecaries and spice merchants 103-5; University of 91 parity, use of term 94 particularisms 181, 191 parties 4, 59, 61; “catch-all” 152; nomenklatura 175n; regime 117; “satellite” 158-9; splinter groups 62; use of pre-election polls 121 Pascal, Blaise 20 Pascalian Meditations (Bourdieu) 83 Passeron, Jean-Claude 68 passeurs (carriers) 184-6, 188, 189-90 past: dealing with sins by confession or penance 164-7; imposing interpretations of the 155-7, 159, 161-74 patrimonialism 30, 31, 34-5, 43-4; central and local 50; patronage 35 pedagogy 18, 73; authoritarian structure of relations 69; political 12; of preparatory classes 139-40; rational 112; see also education “people”, construction of the 21, 126 perestroika 163 personal power: as private appropriation of public might 44; shift to bureaucratic 48-51 Peterson, Paul 187 petitions 61, 79 phenomenology 3, 136, 137 philanthropy 185 Philip IV (Philippe le Bel) 32 Philippe Auguste 39 philosophy 12, 56; domination of German 181-2; particularities of 181

Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Bourdieu) 68 Poirier 91, 92 Poland 72-3, 151

216

IN D E X

political action: as economic action 57-8, 70; identified with voting 70; and mode of existence of group 56; and pressure groups 117; and public opinion polls 16; and scientific research 84; and rationalization of public action 6, 125; social and political conditions of intellectual 75 political activism: Bourdieu’s 5, 18, 65-90; and scientific inquiry 13, 65-90 political capital 94; conversion into symbolic power 153-4; cultural capital opposed by 155, 167; de­ institutionalization of 155, 175n “ political correctness” 180 political field 3, 5, 6, 13; academic and 189-90; Bourdieu’s theory applied to former Czechoslovak 151-77; closure 72, 111; concept of 152-4; democratic 111-12; emergence of 107; intersection with media 190; logic aligned with the economic field 127-8; polarization of the 7, 152, 154, 157, 161-74; post-Communist 155-7 Fig. 8.1; relationship with social space 154; role of polls 113, 116, 124-6; role as theater 15, 151-77; as site for power of representation 14, 117, 120; structure of 94; and symbolic elasticity of the social world 7; transformation of the 118, 119-21; see also bureaucratic field; field of power political game 14, 65, 152; crisis of faith in 72-5, 81-2, 128; and public opinion polls 16, 120-1, 125-6 political leaders: role of 75; and symbolic capital 163-4; use of opinion polls 125 political office, enigma of the see mysterium o f ministerium

political order, with values, language and logic 43, 94 political parties see parties political philosophy: jurist 46-7; spiritualist 2 political power: and intellectual autonomy 71; legitimation by elite schools 6, 138-40; and representation 10, 117, 120 “Political Representation: Elements for a Theory of the Political Field” (Bourdieu) 14 political science 2, 114; colonizing of polling institutes 119, 120, 123; depoliticization by 71-2; monopoly over public debate 74-5 politicians: journalists’ interviews of 126; popularity ratings 126; use of media to address the electorate directly 117-18; view of polls 114, 123, 124 politics: about will and representation 3, 55-63; administrative field independent of 48; autonomization of the political 94; and culture 1, 13, 66, 78; and “double naturalization” of the social world 20; effective for Bourdieu 74-5; ethics 75; false alternatives in 76; of fields and politics of habitus 19-20, 142; grass-roots participation 84; immersion in 65; particularities of 181; perceptions shaken by opinion polls 127-8; post-Communist 158; problematics of established 19; reduced to morality 181, 185; reflexive sociology of 2; representative 14, 55-62 politics of recognition 4, 20-1, 34, 47, 61, 191 polling: conflict of legitimacy with voting 16, 24n; control commission 121; institutes colonized by political scientists

IN D E X

119; negates debate 128; as a rational instrument of democracy 127-8; reasons for initial rejection in France 116-19; studies on marketing model 122; see also questions polls: confidential 117, 125; manipulation of 127, 128; policy and uses of 124; proliferation of 113; publication of fake 121; sampling 58, 114-15, 119, 123; voting intention see pre-election polls; see also opinion polls; pre­ election polls; surveys popular assemblies 101, 102 position: different types of capital and 153; and disposition 3, 19-20, 136; dissociation of public and private interest 43-5 post-Communist politics, development of a theory 152-7 post-Communist societies 151-77; dealing with the past 164-7; economics 157 postmodernism 179, 180 Poupeau, Franck viii 5, 64-90 poverty 188-9 power: administrative exercise of 46, 48-51; anthropology of 133; and capital 16, 61, 144; concentration and rationalization in wars 35; conflict between different forms 16; delegated 60-1; differentiation and agency 48-51; dissociation between imperium (public might) and dominium (private power) 43-4; as an effect of structural homologies 140-6; Foucault’s conception compared with Bourdieu’s 144-5; imagination in 10; imperial power, decline of 34; inheritance of privilege and 142-3; legitimation by elite schools 6, 138-40; and personal relations 31-2; powerlessness 58, 61; private, political

217

expropriation of 43-4; protection against monopolization of 38; rationalization of 4, 19, 35, 46; public and private distinction 43; relations of 83, 94, 120, 153; to remake reality 3, 134-5, 140; reality and use of concepts 47; resilience of structures 144-6; right and truth 145-6; shift from personal to bureaucratic 48-51; social 33; sociology of 135; and specialty 39-40; structural differentiation of 17; structural homologies, and power 140-6 Fig. 7.1; transmission of and social reproduction 96-100, 135; transnational relations of 180; tripartite division in dynastic state 37; and the unconscious 145-6; “world-making” 140; see also field of power; symbolic power practice 83, 136-8; economy of 15, 83; immanent logic of 137-8; social practice: belief in unchanging 94; political writings and social practice 47; see also democratic practice Prague Spring 166, 170 pre-election polls 113, 121, 126, 129n; credibility of 113; effects of 122-4; legitimacy of 113 Prévôt, Antoine 102 priests, celibate 37, 38 primogeniture 31 “Principles for a Reflection on the Contents of Instruction” (Gros-Bourdieu Commission) 73 private property: public offices as 42; transmission of 142 production, mode of expression of opinion distinguished from mode of 21, 56-7, 59-62, 96 “Production of Dominant Ideology, The” (Bourdieu) 13 progressive tradition 13-14, 60

218

IN D E X

property: credentials and title to 5; restitution in Czech Republic 163; see also private property “Propositions for an Education of the Future” (Bourdieu) 73 protest: 1980s 74; antinomy of collective 62; by the unemployed 80; December 1995 movement 78-81; May 1968 68-9, 114; monopoly of legitimate 62; social 13; student mass 74, 78-9; see also demonstrations Protestants, and Catholics in conflict 94, 105 public authorities 43, 45 public debate see debate, public public goods: commodification of 18, 180; monopoly of the legitimate manipulation of 29, 43-4, 46, 51; public good 75, 107 public offices: direct appointment to 45; hereditary character 42, 45; precise distribution of 105; venality of 42, 100 public opinion 6; as an artifact 15-16, 57-62, 70, 114-16; appeals to 117-19; Bourdieu on 15-16, 69-70, 114-16, 120; capturing by polls 113, 119-21; construction by interest groups 116, 120; critical studies of the production of 115-16, 117-19; existence of 114-16; political construction of 119-21 ; polls see opinion polls; pre-election polls “Public Opinion Does Not Exist” (Bourdieu) 15-16, 69-70, 114 public policy centers 179 public services 75; commodification of 79; discourse 47-8 public sphere 11, 14, 44 publishers 7, 13; Basil Blackwell 186; editorial autonomy 68 publishing, homogenization and internationalization of academic 185-6

questions: biased 121, 123; closed 115; and interpretations of responses 123 “Questions of Politics” (Bourdieu) 14 race 7; American dominance of definition of concept of 182-5, 187, 191-2; black-white dichotomy, US concept of 182-92; color: continuum of 183, intellectuals of 190-1; Ford Foundation 187; hypodescent 183; and identity 182; métis (mixed-race) 184; pardo 187; racial differences, in US compared to Brazil 182-4; racism 18, 27n 182; slavery 37, 182; stigmatization and symbolic construction of 183-4; symbolic construction of 183-4; theories of race relations 184-5 Racine, Jean 37 Raisons d’agir 13, 19, 80-1; publishing house 13, 80-2, 116 rationality, practical 46, 137; rational choice theory 137, 198n rationalization: of domination 4, 19, 35, 46; of public action 6, 125 Rawls, John 181 reason 4, 46, 48, 74; critique of scholastic 83; imperialist 18, 178-98; juridical 107; Realpolitik of 18, 72-5, 76-7; of state (raison d ’Etat) 29-54, 43-8; technoscientific 13 reception: academic conditions of 84; field of 179 recognition: cultural 20-1, 179; institutional 104-5, 179; (mis-) 10, 178, 187; politics of 4, 20-1, 34, 47, 61, 191 redistribution, selective 20, 41, 43 reflexivity 21, 95 reform communism 155-7, 158-9, 161-2, 164, 167, 168, 170, 173

IN D E X

Reformed Church 62 relations of force 83, 153 religion 72, 134; Catholics, and Protestants in conflict 94, 105; Islam 78; religious orders, electoral processes 96-7, 101, 106; secularization 47 Renaissance 6 representation 3, 10, 55; alchemy of 4, 15; in collective action 5, 60-2, 92; equality of 93; institutional 105; legitimate of political practice 127-8; political as constitutive of symbolic power 153-4; and political power 10; political of women 94; of populations 106; proportional 93; relation of 153; of social interests 153; of spices as exotic 103-5; theatricalized 15, 151-77 reproduction: academic mode of 30, 142; access to the instruments of 179; bureaucratic mode 40, 41-3, 44-5; conflict between modes of 40; direct 142, 144; familial mode of 34; of the field of power by elite schools 74; genealogical mode 32, 40; recruitment to avoid dangers of 38; school-based 5, 142-4; strategies of capital accumulation 30; see also social reproduction Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Bourdieu) 69 res publica 66; king as guardian of 46 resistance: communist to German occupation 11; intellectual weapons of 78-81, 82; strategies of 144 revolutionary consciousness: and colonial war 66-8; conditions of access to 67 Richelieu, Cardinal 97 Richet, Denis 51 Ricoeur, Paul 79

219

right: power and truth 145-6; universal of speech 7 right-wing politics 154; Czech Republic 157, 161-7; and public opinion 120 Ringer, Fritz 178 rites: of consecration 31; of institution 15 Robespierre, Maximilien Marie Isidore de 11 Rocard, Michel 73, 74 Roman Catholic Church: in politics 30; power and vested interests 41 Roman Law 35, 40, 45 Rome, ancient 94 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 117 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 60 Rules o f Art, The (Bourdieu) 76-7 ruling class: comparative-historical anthropology of 6, 135, 146; concept of 16; esprit de corps 139-40; ideology 13, 18; process of dissolution within 146 rupture, false 179, 181 Rushdie, Salman 77 Rwanda 77 Saint-Simon Foundation 79, 88n 179 Sarajevo 77 Sartre, Jean-Paul 19, 66 Sauvy, Alfred 117 savoir-pouvoir (Foucault) 145 Sayad, Abdelmalek 66, 67 Sayer, Derek 45 schemata see disposition; habitus Schmitt, Karl 154 scholastic fallacy 83 schools: certification of social hierarchies by 134-5; disciplining of minds 138-40; foundation of urban (15th and 16th centuries) 45; ideology of “liberating” 112, 113, 129n; see also elite schools Schopenhauer, Arthur 3

220

IN D E X

science 13, 18; as an instrument of legitimation of power 4, 11; Bourdieu’s commitment to 12, 64; defining objects of scientific inquiry 120; political power and the scientific field 71; politicization through scientific knowledge 55, 66; and political activism 13, 70-2, 84; private sponsorship of scientific research 77; rhetoric of scientificity 6; scientific administrators 71, 77 - 8; scientists 40 seals: of delegated power 61; evolution of practices re royal 49-50; power of 49-50 secession, and distinction 103-5 Sens commun, Le 68 Slovakia: and Czech Republic 7, 151-77; language law debate 169; left-wing political strategy 157, 168-74; nationalism 168-74; political parties 160 social capital, closure of 43, 139-40 social conditions of possibility 56, 64, 72, 112; of democratic practice 2, 10, 14, 21, 62, 112-14 social movements 18, 70, 74, 78- 81; as resistance to neoliberalism and conservatism 82-4; umbrella 157 social order, and academic order 135 social problems, de-politicization of 180, 188-90 social reproduction: collective decision-making and 92; in oligarchies 99-100; through educational system 139-40, 142-3; and transmission of powers 96-100, 135 social science 3, 65; academic formalism and standardization in 71-2; Bourdieu’s effect on 120; diffusion of American thought

185-6; status as a science 65; theory effect in 15 social space 47; class rule and structure of the 134-5; conflicts transposed to political field from 151-77; field of power and field of elite schools 142-6; and political struggles 6-7; and the state 17; web of relations in 135, 142-6 social structures: embodied 137; and mental structures 6, 17, 20, 29, 136-8, 141-6, 148n; see also disposition; habitus Social Structures o f the Economy, The (Bourdieu) 82 social world: naturalization of the dominant vision 20, 81-4, 182-91; politics and “double naturalization” 20; relations of domination in 21; schooling constructs 17; scientific knowledge of 55; social construction of 103, 137; symbolic elasticity of 7 socialism 11, 162; and liberalism 76 Socialist Party 11, 12, 73, 80 sociodicy: negative and positive 17; racist 184-5; schools as action of 134-5; see also legitimacy sociology 3, 12; autonomy of the sociological field 71; as an inescapably political science 3, 65-6, 71-2; autonomy of 70-2; Bourdieu’s role for 66, 71-2, 80-1, 84; of culture 134-5; democratization of 112; of education and culture 68-9, 134-5; of habitus and field 137-8; of knowledge 135; of organizations 108n; political 111-12, 135-8; of power 135; of voting and historical analysis 94-6 solidarity, corporate 50 Solidarnosc trade union (Poland) 72-3

IN D E X

Sontag, Susan 77 Soviet Union, former 59; collapse of 7, 76 Spanish Civil War 11 spokespersons 5, 60-2, 176 Stalinism 12 state: as an antiphysis 44; annexation by bourgeoisie in struggle for economic capital 144- 6; as bank of symbolic capital 17, 74; and the bureaucratic field 50; as civilizing process (Elias) 46; construction 25n 47; as corpus mysticum 36; defeudalization of the 44-5; expertise 71; as fictio juris 46-7; formation 4, 6; genesis of the 29-54; historical model of emergence of the modern bureaucratic 4; “institutionalized” corruption of 42, 75; juridical representation of the 36; king as embodiment of the 32, 41, 43; as the “king’s house” 31; managers 71; mental categories and the 17; modern 30; monopoly over legitimate use of symbolic violence 15-17, 145- 6; nation-state 96; nation­ state compared with dynastic state 30; papal state 38, 99; pauperization of the 180; princes and development of the modern state 44-5; professors, as minor prophets of 44; profits and 41, 42, 51; right hand and left hand 17; statist principle 36; structural corruption of 42-3, 50; theory of the 46-7; transcendence of the 32; and vested interests 41; welfare 41; welfare retrenchment 5, 13, 179, 188-9; see also bureaucratic state; dynastic state State Nobility, The (Bourdieu) 69, 74 statistics: aggregation of individual opinions 5, 57-9, 70, 92-3; use in opinion polls 120

221

status 20; and voting power 92-3 Stiebet, J. W. 30 Stoetzel, Jean 70, 116 “Stranglehold of the Journalistic Field” (Bourdieu) 18 strikes 16; (1995) 64, 78-9; teachers’ (1987) 74 structuralism 3, 136, 138; critique of 2, 83 structure, and agency dualism 6, 135-8 subversion 58, 180 succession: mode defines the kingdom 31; and narrowness of the electoral college 99; wars of 32 supervision, formal models of 42-3 surveys 58, 70, 114, 117, 119; field 121 Sweden 185 symbolic capital 41, 43; of academic elite 140; of group representative 61; of the king 33-4, 42; monopoly in Czech round-table negotiations 152, 158-61; nobility as 30; and political leaders 163-4; private appropriation of 50; state as bank of 17, 74; unequal distribution of 21 symbolic forms, sociology of 6, 133- 4, 135-8 symbolic interactionism 137 symbolic power 10, 11, 15, 18, 120, 146-7n; of the academic world 7, 74; common sense, universal 179; and democratic practice 1-9; in education 134- 5; meaning, relations as relations of force 21, 134-5; in political representation 153-4, 158; in rule of the “state nobility” 133-50; self-fulfilling prophecy 140; specific efficacy of 3, 61; symbolic action 19-20; transnational economy of 18

222

IN D E X

symbolic violence: by inculcation of mental categories 145-6, 184-5; political economy of 134-5; in social domination 112; state monopoly over legitimate use of 15-17, 145-6 technocracy, as mode of domination 75, 79, 135, 146 television 18, 64, 81 Temps modernes. Les 67, 114, 130 -ln theorization, and universalization 15, 179 think tanks 19, 80, 83, 179, 180, 190 thinking: habits of 49; mode of canon law 46-7; politically 66; pure 56, 66; statistical mode of 58 tiers état 47 Tocqueville, Alexis de 191 Touraine, Alain 79 truth, power and right 145-6; trial, logic of the 182 underclass 7, 186; use of term 187-9 unions, trade 59, 61, 72-3, 84 United States: Civil Rights movement 182, 187; exceptionalism 191; folk concepts 7, 183-7, 191; Gallup polls 116; hegemony 83, 185; as a model 7, 180, 182-5; model of opinion polls 116, 117, 122; “one-drop rule” 183; universities 178 universal: corporatism of the 76-7; progress towards the 59, 74-5, 76; standards 184, 195n universalism 20, 48 universalization 75, 178-98; of American model 7, 182-91; of conditions of access to the universal 59; false 181, 191-2; strategies 17, 21, 51, 182; and theorization 15, 179

universities 142; American 7, 178; credentials 69; crisis of 68-9, 78; education of nobility at 45; elections in 91-2; and elite schools 144; entry according to social origins 113; expansion of 13, 44; see also academic field Urban Poverty and the Underclass 186 utopianism 19, 57, 65, 70; realism, sociological and civic utopianism 19 values, political 2 Vaussin, Claude 97 Verneinung see denegation Vienna 84 violence: ethno-racial in US 183-4; latent in colonial system 67; management by warriors 37; material and symbolic 16, 112, 184-5 virtues: civic 75; scholastic 139 visibility 15, 80-1 “voice”: dispossession of 70; or “exit” 57, 61; of the people 119-21, 126; speaking with one 100-3 Voltaire 19 vote: aggregative logic of the individual 5, 70, 92-3; dictionary definition 56; liberty and plurality of the 91; logic of the 59; proxy 59; social conditions of production 56, 59; transmission of office by 100 voting 4, 6; abstention from 14, 58-9, 106, 128; assimilation to democratic suffrage 6, 94; by “filiation” 97-8; by head 97-8; collective decision-making in 56, 100-3; conflict of legitimacy with polling 16, 24n; and democratic suffrage 6, 94; demographic weight in 103-4; dictionary definition 55; formal procedures 96; historical analysis, and

IN D E X

sociology of 94-6; individualmajoritarian 6, 93-4, 101; intention see pre-election polls; in liberal vision of democracy 56-7, 70-2; and logic of individual action 57-8; opinion polls and the utility of 16, 127-8; organiccollegial 6, 92, 93-4, 99, 102-3, 106; proportional representation 93; respect for procedures of 106-7; secrecy 57, 102; sociology and historical analysis 94-6; subordinate groups, aggregative logic of the individual vote 5, 57-9; suffrage: universal in France 59, 113, 118; voting and democratic 6, 94; to maintain external cohesion 102-3; to resolve conflicts 100-3; two conceptions of 92; see also elections Wacquant, Loïc viii 10-28, 133-50, 178-98 Wagley, Charles 182-3 wars: concentration and rationalization of power 35, 37; and princes 44; of religion

223

(16th-century) 94; of succession 32; see also colonial war; “palace wars” Weber, Max 2, 16, 44, 58, 59, 72, 133, 135 Weight of the World, The (Bourdieu) 74, 80, 112 welfare, retrenchment 5, 13, 79, 179, 188-9 will: new definition of the collective 94; of the people 15, 113; and representation 3, 55-63; royal 49; see also “general will” Will, Pierre-Etienne 42 women: dynastic principle 36; political representation of 94; Women’s Studies 190 working class: marginalization 189; political judgments of 14; political representation of workers in Slovakia 157, 168-74 World Bank 83 World Trade Organization 83 writing, power of 37, 39, 46-7 Zeroual, Liamine 78 Zola, Emile 19

la n y w e r e su r p r ise d d u r in g th e 1 9 9 0 s b y P ierre B o u r d ie u 's in c r e a s in g ly o p e n an< Irpr’t e n g a g e m e n t in d e m o c r a tic p o litic s . T h e p r e s e n t c o lle c t io n h e lp s to e x p la in th l BjZ - J n te llerriia l r o o ts o f th is e n g a g e m e n t - w h ic h lie d e e p in B o u r d ie u 's th e o r y - as w e l *as its sig n ific a n c e . B o th B o u r d ie u 's c o n tr ib u tio n s to p o litic a l u n d e r s ta n d in g a n d thi$ pook's c o n tr ib u tio n s to u n d e r s ta n d in g B o u r d ie u a re o f e n d u r in g value."

C ra ig Calhoun, P resid en t, S o c ia l S cien ce R e se a rc h C o u n cil ' C a n P ie r r e B o u r d ie u 's s o c i o l o g y c o n t r ib u t e a n y th in g d is t in c t iv e to o u r u n d e r s ta n d in g o f d e m o c r a tic p o litic s? T h is sc in tilla tin g v o lu m e a n s w e r s w ith a r e s o u n d in g 'yes,' as th e c o n tr ib u to r s te a s e o u t th e a s-y e t-u n a p p r e c ia te d p o litic a l im p lic a tio n s o f th e F ren ch s o c io lo g is t's s ig n a tu r e c o n c e p ts."

N an cy Fraser, N ew S ch ool f o r S o c ia l R e sea rch

Pierre B ou rd ieu w as a brilliant so c io lo g ist an d social thinker; h e w as also an in te n se ly p olitical m an w h o s e w ork is o f p r o fo u n d sign ifican ce for reth in k in g d em ocratic life. This * ^original v o lu m e p resen ts and d e v e lo p s B ou rd ieu 's d istin ctive co n trib u tio n to th e th eory an d p ractice o f d em ocratic p olitics. It e x p lica tes and illustrates his co re c o n c e p ts o f p olitical field and field o f p ow er, his h istorical m o d e l o f th e bureaucratic state, and his in flu en tial analyses o f th e p ractices an d in stitu tio n s in v o lv ed in th e p arad oxical p h e n o m e n o n o f p olitical rep resen ta tio n - starting w ith th e en ig m a o f d e le g a tio n , o r w h at h e called th e "mystery o f ministry." T h e fruitfulness o f B ourdieu's ap p roach is d em o n stra ted in a series o f in tegrated stu d ies o f votin g, p u b lic o p in io n p o lls, party d ynam ics, class rule, and state-b u ild in g, as w e ll as by careful analyses o f B o u rd ieu ’s o w n civic e n g a g e m e n ts and his th eo retica l treatm en t o f th e p o litics o f rea so n and r e co g n itio n in co n tem p o ra ry society. C harting th e c o n n e c tio n s b e tw e e n B ou rd ieu 's p olitical view s, th e m ain n o d e s o f his so c io lo g y o f d em ocratic rep resen tation , an d th e im p lica tio n s o f this so c io lo g y for p rogressive civic th o u g h t and action , this b o o k w ill b e o f in terest to stu d e n ts and sch olars across th e gam u t o f d isc ip lin e s as w ell as to citizen s c o n c e r n e d w ith r e n e w in g stru ggles for socia l justice.

L o ïc W acq u an t is D istin gu ish ed U niversity P rofessor o f S o c io lo g y and A n th rop ology at Sh e N e w S ch o o l for Social R esearch, P rofessor o f S o c io lo g y at th e U niversity o f C aliforniaBerkeley, and R esearcher at th e C entre d e so c io lo g ie e u r o p é e n n e in Paris. His re c e n t' b o o k s in clu d e Body a n d Soul: N otebooks o f An Apprentice Boxer a n d D eadly Symbiosis: Race a n d the Rise o f N eoliberal Penality (also w ith Polity).

C o v e r il lu s tr a t io n : J e a n V cber, Jaurès à ta tribune etc la Chambre des députés (Musée Carnavalet)b A r c h it o I c o n o g r a f ic o . S.A. C O RI3IS C o v e r d e s ig n b y IS u d d h a M e d ia P r in te d .in G r e a t lir ita in

polity -(feviMM.polity.co.uk

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