Материал: Robbins - Sociology and Philosophy in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu, 1965-75

Journal of Classical Sociology

Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi Vol 2(3): 299–328 [1468–795X(200211)2:3;299–328;031196] www.sagepublications.com

Sociology and Philosophy in the Work of

Pierre Bourdieu, 1965–751

DEREK ROBBINS University of East London

ABSTRACT The paper first offers a brief account of the competition between the Durkheimian sociological tradition and German philosophy in the period in which

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Bourdieu was a student at the Ecole Normale Sup´erieure. It indicates the intellectual influences of the early years that Bourdieu subsequently acknowledged and then examines his use of the work of Weber in his first book, Sociologie de l’Alg´erie (1958). The paper then focuses on the development of Bourdieu’s thought from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, a period in which he strategically presented himself as an anti-humanist sociologist whilst also articulating a view of science that was in tune with phenomenological and ontological philosophy. Bourdieu’s ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945’ (1967a) receives particular attention since his analysis of sociology and philosophy in France in the post-war period was a key element in his own position-taking in respect of the two disciplines. The paper then examines Bourdieu’s critiques of Weber at this time and suggests that his dissatisfaction with Weber’s epistemology logically became a dissastisfaction with the claims of sociological explanation as such. There followed an attempt to reconcile a commitment to social science with an allegiance to elements of phenomenological thought. The outcome was a willingness on Bourdieu’s part to see reflexivity as a means to problematizing sociological explanation more than as a means to refining it or making it more sophisticated. The consequence was that commitments to phenomenological ontology and social science co-existed in this period. The balance was to change again subsequently in Bourdieu’s thought, and his responsivenesss to changing conditions exemplifies how we should ourselves rethink the relations between possible future social theories and the classical theories of Western sociology.

KEYWORDS Bourdieu, phenomenology, philosophy, sociology, Weber

The specificity of the title is significant in two respects. Bourdieu insisted that the relations between disciplines or modes of thinking are not immutable or atemporal. In particular, the relations between sociology and philosophy are, in his word, ‘arbitrary’, or, perhaps more precisely, socially and historically contingent. In part, this article explores Bourdieu’s representation of this contingency in French intellectual life, but it is also an article that considers the contingency within Bourdieu’s own intellectual production during one decade. I begin by offering a brief account of the competition between the Durkheimian sociological tradition and German philosophy in the period in which Bourdieu was a student

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at the Ecole Normale Sup´erieure. I indicate, firstly, the intellectual influences of his early years, which Bourdieu subsequently acknowledged, and then examine his use of the work of Weber in his first book – Sociologie de l’Alg´erie (1958). I then focus on the development of Bourdieu’s thought from the mid-1960s to the mid1970s, a period in which he strategically presented himself as an anti-humanist sociologist whilst also articulating a view of science that was in tune with phenomenological and ontological philosophy. Bourdieu’s ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945’ (1967a) receives particular attention since his analysis of sociology and philosophy in France in the post-war period was a key element in his own position-taking in respect of the two disciplines. The article examines Bourdieu’s critiques of Weber and suggests that his dissatisfaction with Weber’s epistemology logically became a dissatisfaction with the claims of sociological explanation as such. There followed an attempt to reconcile a commitment to social science with an allegiance to elements of phenomenological thought. The outcome was a willingness on Bourdieu’s part to see reflexivity as a means to problematizing sociological explanation more than as a means to refining it or making it more sophisticated. The consequence was that commitments to phenomenological ontology and social science co-existed in this period. The balance was to change again subsequently in Bourdieu’s thought, and his responsiveness to changing conditions exemplifies how we should ourselves rethink the relations between possible social theories and the classical theories of Western sociology.

The State of French Sociology in the 1920s

Georges Davy published Sociologues d’hier et d’aujourd’hui in 1931. It was a collection of four studies – on Espinas, Durkheim, McDougall in relation to Durkheimian sociology, and L´evy-Bruhl – that had been published in French journals during the 1920s, preceded by an article on ‘La Sociologie Française de 1918 a` 1925’, which had first been published in English in The Monist in 1926. In spite of the consideration of American social psychology in the third study, the collection was narrowly nationalist. There were no references to American sociology or to Marx or Weber. The assessment of past and present sociologists indicated by the title amounted exclusively to a consideration of the progress of an independent French tradition. Davy was a first-generation Durkheimian, which

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meant that he saw himself as a second-generation positivist. Born at the time of Comte’s death, L´evy-Bruhl and Durkheim separately and differently as students at

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the Ecole Normale Sup´erieure in the 1880s began to give intellectual and institutional flesh to the emergent ‘sociology’ sketched in the Cours de philosophie

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positive. Born in 1883 and also a student at the Ecole Normale Sup´erieure, Davy became associated with the Ann´ee Sociologique ‘cluster’ (Clark, 1973) in 1910, and as early as 1912 – five years before the death of Durkheim – published a choice of Durkheim texts with an introductory study of his sociological system in a series devoted to ‘Les Grands Philosophes. Français et etrangers’´ (Davy, 1912).

Davy was an apologist for Durkheim. Writing his introduction to Sociologues d’hier et d’aujourd’hui in 1926, he celebrated the pioneering work of SaintSimon and Comte with ‘their idea of a distinct social reality, the object of a distinct social science as objective as the other sciences’ (1931: 6), which was the origin of a ‘positivist and rationalist sociology’ that, he argued, had been in eclipse for a good quarter of a century. Davy was convinced that this sociology was going to be reborn with the work of Espinas and spread with the work of Durkheim and his school. During this period of ‘eclipse’ – presumably between 1900 and 1925 – Davy was prepared to acknowledge the importance of the followers of Le Play, particularly in respect of their methodology, but there was no doubt in his mind that the future lay with the Durkheimians. He welcomed the editions of the work of Saint-Simon which were published in 1924 and 1925 under the influence of Bougl´e and the appearance of key posthumous editions of Durkheim’s work in the mid-1920s, and he warmly praised Bougl´e’s own work and that of Fauconnet, placing his own texts, particularly Le droit, l’id´ealisme et l’exp´erience (1922), within the same increasingly dominant Durkheimian movement. The emergent intellectual dominance was in the process of being underpinned by significant institutional developments. At the end of his introductory article, Davy pointed to the fact that sociology had now been accepted within the Licence and had also been introduced as a subject for study in the ecoles´ normales primaires and for the baccalaur´eat. The mutual support of institutional and intellectual trends was consolidated by the production of several sociology textbooks, one of which was his own El´ements de sociologie (1924). Davy was confident that he was part of an unstoppable resurgence of sociological analysis that was still firmly attached to the ideological and methodological commitments of the mid-19th-century founders.

Influences on French Thought after 1930

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Pierre Bourdieu was born in 1930 and he studied at the Ecole Normale Sup´erieure from 1951 to 1955. The situation was by then far from what Davy had expected. Shortly before the year of publication of Sociologues d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, Edmund Husserl had given what were to be published as his Paris Lectures

(Husserl, 1964). By the mid-1950s, Merleau-Ponty had researched the Husserl Archive in Louvain and was influential in disseminating his ideas in France. Lyotard wrote a small introduction to phenomenology in 1954 in which he discussed Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and Bourdieu’s near contemporary at the

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Ecole, Derrida, was writing an introduction to a translation of Husserl’s Origins of Geometry (Derrida, 1974). Also in 1954, Foucault participated in the translation of Ludwig Binswanger’s Traum und Existenz, and wrote a long introductory discussion of existential psychiatry for it. The influence of Heidegger was apparent here as it had been in the work of Sartre during the 1930s leading to the

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publication of L’Etre et le n´eant in 1943. Meanwhile, Raymond Aron had been responsible for introducing the work of Dilthey, Rickert, Simmel and Weber in his

Essai sur la th´eorie de l’histoire dans l’Allemagne contemporaine (1938). Equally, of course, Jean Hyppolite in particular had been responsible for the renewed interest in Hegel and for the consequential rise of Marxist existentialism that has been described in detail by Mark Poster (1975). In parallel with this French interest in German thought in the period between 1930 and 1960 was the tangible effect of the period of the Second World War on the institutional situation of sociology. Davy’s confidence was misplaced, for very tangible reasons. Appended to Roger Geiger’s article ‘Durkheimian Sociology under Attack: The Controversy over

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Sociology in the Ecoles Normales Primaires’ (in Besnard, 1983) is a letter written in 1941 from the Vatican City by the Vichy R´egime’s ambassador to the Vatican, who had been a civil servant at the time of the introduction of sociology into the curriculum of the ecoles´ normales primaires, which Davy celebrated in 1931. L´eon Berard wrote:

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Let us return to the program of the Ecoles Normales Primaires of 1920.

. . . to these normal school students who came from the Higher Primary Schools, who had not done one hour of philosophy, they were going to teach not philosophy, but, among the hundreds or thousands of diverse systems, one fixed system of philosophy: Durkheim’s sociology. I must tell you that for several years the teachings of that rabbinical ideologue had become a sort of official and practically obligatory academic doctrine. The sociologists were in possession of magisterial chairs at the Sorbonne. . . .

From them emanated the decisive and directing influences.

(Besnard, 1983: 135)

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

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

No – that was just the effect of institutional authority. And our contempt for sociology was intensified by the fact that a sociologist could be president of the board of examiners of the competitive ‘agr´egation’ exam in philosophy and force us to attend his lectures – which we thought were lousy – on Plato and Rousseau.

(1990: 5)

Bourdieu was referring here to Georges Davy. Davy’s authority epitomized for him the contemporary condition of Durkheimianism. It possessed institutional capital but had forfeited intellectual capital.

Bourdieu’s Philosophical Training

In considering the relationship of Bourdieu’s work to the classical tradition of sociology, it is important to keep firmly in mind the fact that he was trained in philosophy and was not at all formally educated either as a sociologist or as an anthropologist. For his diplˆome d’´etudes sup´erieures, he prepared a translation of Leibniz’s Animadversiones in partem generalem Principiorum cartesianorum and wrote a commentary on it under the supervision of Henri Gouhier, a historian of philosophy. In one of his last interviews – with Yvette Delsaut (Delsaut & Rivi`ere, 2002) – Bourdieu did not deny that whilst he was teaching at the Lyc´ee in Moulins from 1955 to 1956 he had registered to write a th`ese d’´etat under the supervision of Georges Canguilhem on ‘Les structures temporelles de la vie affective’. It appears that this did not materialize but, in the 1985 interview from which I have already quoted, Bourdieu mentioned that he had ‘undertaken research into the “phenomenology of emotional life”, or more exactly into the temporal structures of emotional experience’ (1990: 6–7), and it seems likely that he was referring to this unwritten or incomplete thesis. In the same interview, Bourdieu supplied more information about the people who had influenced his intellectual develop-

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ment when he was a student at the Ecole Normale Sup´erieure. There are several important components of this development.

First of all, Bourdieu acknowledged that he had ‘read Being and Nothingness very early on, and then Merleau-Ponty and Husserl’. He was, therefore, well aware of what he called ‘phenomenology, in its existentialist variety’. He argued that he had never ‘really got into the existentialist mood’, but, nevertheless admitted that:

I read Heidegger, I read him a lot and with a certain fascination, especially the analyses in Sein und Zeit of public time, history and so on, which, together with Husserl’s analyses in Ideen II, helped me a great deal – as