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

between crisis capitalism and organization capitalism, accompanied by a transition from philosophical, historical and humanistic sociology to the a-historical sociological thinking of today’ (Goldmann, 1966: 6, quoted in Bourdieu, 1967a: 190).

The position Bourdieu was adopting in ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945’ on the eve of the May events in Paris of 1968 is complicated, but it can be summarized in the following way. The second-generation Durkheimians in whom Davy had placed such confidence in 1931 had, for Bourdieu, lost contact with the pioneering intellectual achievement of the early Durkheim. Durkheimianism had routinized positivism and had become assimilated to institutionalized university philosophy. There had been a shift towards a spiritualization of the conscience collective in Durkheim’s own late work and this had partly been the consequence of seeking institutional accommodation with philosophical opponents. The immediate post-war period had seen an explicable rise in libertarian philosophy, and this had inhibited the progress of the scientific analysis of social systems. Structuralism had accommodated phenomenology and philosophical individualism whilst American empirical sociology was becoming popular because it presented itself as unphilosophical and, for this reason, was uncritically compliant with the orientations of organization capitalism. What was needed was an empirical social science that was grounded on a sound epistemology. One of the problems of the war period was that the institutional links that maintained dialogue between philosophy and social science were severed and, for a while, the intellectual discourses existed in isolation from each other. Bourdieu pointed hopefully to the fact that ‘all but non-existent between 1950 and 1960, research workers with a philosophical background, and more especially graduates in

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philosophy or from the Ecole Normale, find their way into the research institutions that had been established without them’ (1967a: 208).

The philosophers now cited as contributing to a new engagement of philosophy with social science were Bachelard, Piaget, Gu´eroult, Canguilhem, and Vuillemin, none of whom was associated with the dominant non-university philosophy spearheaded by Sartre. The philosophies produced by these intellectuals were

. . . predisposed, by the very object they choose for themselves and by the way in which they approach it, to lend sociology the theoretical assistance it needs, if only by posing the generic question of the conditions that make possible any scientific practice.

(1967a: 211)

Significantly, Bourdieu also commented in a footnote that what these intellectuals had in common was that they came from ‘working-class or lower middle-class backgrounds and primarily from the provinces’ (1967a: 211 fn.54).

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Bourdieu’s purpose in writing ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945’ is now clear. Having initially dabbled with L´evi-Straussian thinking in the early 1960s, he had then, in seeking to present himself as a sociologist, been tempted by American quantitative methods. The detailed statistical appendices to L’amour de l’art suggest this temporary temptation. However, by 1966/7, Bourdieu was committed to establishing a new reconciliation between philosophy and sociology that would underpin the empirical practice of the research group that he was to lead from 1968. Equally, he began to articulate a philosophy of social science that would enable sociologists to be politically engaged without accepting the Sartrian philosophy of engagement. At the same time, he sought to outline a theory of social science that emphasized research practice and was quite separate from the practice of university social science teaching. In his own terms, he was about to begin the process of establishing an intellectual field of social science discourse within which his own creative practices would be legitimated, and it was logical that this preparatory period should culminate in the launching of the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales in 1975, which was to function for Bourdieu’s theory of practice as the Ann´ee Sociologique had for Durkheimianism.

Emergent Philosophy of Social Science

These were very productive and significant years for Bourdieu. In 1967 (1967b) he published his translation into French of Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholastic Thought (1957), concluding with a ‘postface’ the argument of which is, in part, repeated in ‘Syst`emes d’enseignement et syst`emes de pens´ee’ (1967c). Panofsky was a disciple of Cassirer, and Bourdieu was clearly interested in Cassirer’s thought throughout this period. Not only did he cite Cassirer’s ‘Structuralism in Modern Linguistics’ (1945) and his ‘Sprache und Mythos’ (1925) in articles, but, as General Editor of Le Sens Commun series for Les

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Editions de Minuit, Bourdieu was responsible for organizing the translations into French of five works by Cassirer between 1972 and 1977, notably the three volumes of La philosophie des formes symboliques (1972) and Substance et fonction: El´ements pour une th´eorie du concept (1977). Bourdieu produced Le m´etier de sociologue in 1968 (1968a). This was subtitled ‘Epistemological Preliminaries’ and was intended as the first of several volumes that would be of practical value to research students. It offered a blueprint for the theory of sociological knowledge that he was counterposing against structuralism. Indeed this was the title of an article which appeared in 1968 in Social Research, almost as a companion piece with ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945’. ‘Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge’ (1968c) was never published in French. In 1970, Bourdieu published La reproduction: El´ements pour une th´eorie du syst`eme d’enseignement (1970a). The following year he published both ‘Une interpr´etation de la th´eorie de la religion selon Max Weber’ (1971a) and ‘Gen`ese et structure du

champ religieux’ (1971b). There were other significant texts in these years, but I want to highlight the section of the first chapter of Esquisse d’une th´eorie de la pratique, pr´ec´ed´ de trois etudes´ d’ethnologie kabyle (1972), which was published separately in translation in 1973 as ‘The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge’. All these texts of these years, and others of the same period, cross-refer richly, but I want to examine in detail the abstract statement of theory that Bourdieu offered in ‘Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge’ (1968c); his application of that theory in seeking to reinterpret the work of Max Weber; and, finally, the consequences of his attempt to extend his theory of sociological practice in his reconsideration of his Algerian fieldwork.

‘Structuralism and Theory of Sociological

Knowledge’

At the beginning of ‘Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge’, Bourdieu insisted that the importance of structuralism was that it introduced a new scientific method rather than that it was a new explanatory theory:

The theory of sociological knowledge, as the system of principles and rules governing the production of all sociological propositions scientifically grounded, and of them alone, is the generating principle of all partial theories of the social and, therefore, the unifying principle of a properly sociological discourse which must not be confused with a unitary theory of the social.

(1968c: 681)

Bourdieu was trying to specify the boundaries of a ‘properly sociological discourse’ as much here as in the opening sentence of ‘Champ intellectuel et projet cr´eateur’. The defining character of sociology lay in its method rather than in its findings. It followed that classical theorists such as Marx, Durkheim and Weber, ‘totally different in their views of social philosophy and ultimate values, were able to agree on the main points of the fundamental principles of the theory of the knowledge of the social world’ (1968c: 682).

This was the guiding principle behind Le m´etier de sociologue (1968a), which assembled passages from ideologically diverse sociological practitioners in order to demonstrate and communicate the unity of ‘sociological meta-science’. In accordance with Comte’s contention, the meta-scientific unity of sociology is united with science in general. It participated in ‘the identity of principles upon which all science, including the science of man, is founded’ (1968c: 682). Tacitly, Bourdieu was attempting to rescue the correct understanding of Comte from Durkheim’s distorting interpretation. Positivism was not advanced by Comte as the particular methodology of the social sciences but, rather, social science was simply the application to social relations of the principles underlying all scientific

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endeavour. Although this is never explicitly stated, Bourdieu’s position was Comtist in that by rejecting ‘substantialist’ in favour of ‘relational’ thinking, he was excluding religious, metaphysical or, more generally, humanist reference from sociological method: ‘The originality of anthropological structuralism lies essentially in the fact that it attacks from first to last the substantialist way of thinking which modern mathematics and physics have constantly striven to refute’ (1968c: 682).

The influence of the non-existentialist philosophers of science is evident here. Bourdieu’s article was devoted to seeking to explain the ways in which, to count as social science, the abstract thinking of mathematics and geometry has to be applied impersonally to social and cultural relations, which are essentially relations between persons. As Bourdieu puts it:

To remove from physics any remnant of substantialism, it has been necessary to replace the notion of force with that of form. In the same way social sciences could not do away with the idea of human nature except by substituting for it the structure it conceals, that is by considering as products of a system of relations the properties that the spontaneous theory of the social ascribes to a substance.

(1968c: 692)

Bourdieu on Weber

There is no space to explore the manifest influence here of Cassirer’s Substance et fonction. The important point is that Bourdieu was seeking to make the identification of immanent systemic relations the keystone of the sociological method underpinning his research practice and that of his colleagues. In order to legitimate the sociological practice that he was advocating, he wrote two articles in which he deliberately distinguished his approach from that of Weber (in ‘Une interprétation de la th´eorie de la religion selon Max Weber’, 1971a) and indicated the ways in which his meta-scientific perspective enabled him to assimilate the theories of religion of Marx, Weber and Durkheim in (‘Gen`ese et structure du champ religieux’, 1971b). The title of the latter implies the basis of Bourdieu’s critique of Weber in the former. For Bourdieu, Weber failed to acknowledge the significance of the objective religious field within which individuals were constituted. By extrapolating ‘types’, Weber imposed extraneously constructed categories on situations that should be understood as categorially self-constituting. Bourdieu made explicit the limited texts of Weber from which he was working, and it would seem that he was now providing a critique of those texts that he had uncritically exploited in Sociologie de l’Alg´erie (1958). Bourdieu argued in ‘Une interpr´etation de la th´eorie de la religion selon Max Weber’ that a latently

interactionist interpretation was always present in Weber’s analyses. To demonstrate this, he pointed to four passages in which he claimed that Weber acknowledged that the behaviour of conceptual ‘types’ – magician, priest and prophet – is in reality constructed in interactive practice. Without denying Weber’s insights, Bourdieu claimed that we can make a break from Weber’s explicit methodology to disclose what he was really suggesting. However, we also need to make a second break. The first break liberated the interactions of agents from the imposition of typological conceptualization. The second break involves recognizing that agents are not themselves autonomous. Rather, the analysis of the logic of interactions has to be subordinated to an analysis of the objective structures within which the interactions have meaning for the agents. Individual agency has to be understood in terms of the ‘field’ within which it is exercised. Without this second break, the danger is that interaction will be understood inter-subjectively or inter-personally, leading to psychological abstraction. By working with explanatory ‘types’, Weber used particular exemplars to analyse the general. Scientificity was constructed – and voluntarism apparently avoided – by generalizing from particular case-studies, but Weber failed to understand that his ‘types’ were actually the products of the system within which they operated rather than autonomous instruments by which the system could be extraneously explained by observers.

Bourdieu elaborated his objection most explicitly in the following footnote:

Amongst the omissions resulting from his failure to construct the religious field as such, Max Weber presents a series of juxtaposed points of view which each time are derived from the position of a particular agent. The most significant omission, without doubt, is the absence of any explicit reference to the strictly objective relationship (because established through time and space) between the priest and the original prophet and, by the same token, the absence of any clear and explicit distinction between the two types of prophecy with which every priesthood must deal – the original prophecy whose message it perpetuates and from which it holds its authority and the competing prophecy which it combats.

(1971a: 6 fn. 5)2

Bourdieu proceeded to argue that a ‘religious field’ functions to satisfy religious ‘need’, but this can only be poorly defined if it is not specified in terms of the needs of different groups and classes. Bourdieu claimed that Weber did not attempt such an elaboration of the ‘constellation of interests’ in competition within a religious field, even though he did feel obliged to take precise account of the particular needs of every professional group or every class. In evidence, Bourdieu referred to Weber’s discussion in ‘Status Groups: Classes and Religion’ and added: ‘Another analysis of the differences between the religious interests of peasants and petit bourgeois town-dwellers can be found in the chapter entitled

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