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

was later the case with Sch¨utz – in my efforts to analyse the ordinary experience of the social.

(Bourdieu, 1990: 5)

It is easily possible to discern from these acknowledgements the provenance of Bourdieu’s concern with the problem of the temporal structures of affective life.

Secondly, the influence of Marx was negatively significant. In the 1985 interview, Bourdieu claimed that Marxism ‘did not really exist as an intellectual position’ in the early 1950s in France, but that ‘I did read Marx at that time for academic reasons; I was especially interested in the young Marx, and I had been fascinated by the “Theses on Feuerbach”’ (1990: 3). This was the decade before Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique (1960) and before the brief intellectual domination of Althusser. Bourdieu was well read in Marx but never committed to Marxism or to the universality of Marxist explanation.

Thirdly, Bourdieu mentioned the influence of several philosophers whose

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classes he attended whilst at the Ecole Normale Sup´erieure. He mentioned the influence on him of Henri Gouhier, Georges Canguilhem, Gaston Bachelard, Eric Weill, Alexander Koyr´e, Martial Gu´eroult and Jules Vuillemin, and commented that:

All these people were outside the usual syllabus, but it’s pretty much thanks to them and to what they represented – a tradition of the history of the sciences and of rigorous philosophy . . . – that I tried, together with those people who, like me, were a little tired of existentialism, to go beyond merely reading the classical authors and to give some meaning to philosophy.

(1990: 4)

There is a common thread that links many of the authors whom Bourdieu cites. That thread relates to Kant in that many of the authors were engaged in academic philosophical analysis of the relevance of Kantian epistemology to the philosophy of natural science, either by reference to pre-critical philosophers such as Leibniz or to post-Kantian thinkers such as Fichte (see, e.g., Gu´eroult, 1930, 1934; Vuillemin, 1954, 1955; Weill, 1963). These authors can, crudely, be put into two categories of thinking: on the one hand, those, like Canguilhem and Bachelard, who were particularly interested in developing a philosophy of science or a historical epistemology with respect to scientific explanation; and, on the other hand, those who were more concerned to engage philosophically with the work of Kant, or post-Kantians like Fichte, or varieties of neo-Kantianism. In different ways, however, this third strand of influence on Bourdieu’s thought involved consideration of the social or historical contingency of scientific explanation. We have Abdelmalek Sayad’s testimony (1996) that what was impressive about Bourdieu’s teaching of Kant at the University of Algiers in the last few years

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of the 1950s was that it used Kantian philosophy to inform methodological practice in social science observation. Bourdieu was interested in Kant and the neo-Kantians to advance reflexive sociological inquiry. His interest in the Critique of Practical Reason, for instance, was that Kantian insights should be deployed to improve the exercise of reason in practice.

This disinclination to philosophize abstractly is also evident in Bourdieu’s remarks about the fourth strand of influence on his early thinking – structuralism. He attacked L´evi-Strauss for appropriating the linguistic science of Saussure in such a way as to maintain the status of philosophy. Making glancing blows against Foucault, Derrida and Barthes, Bourdieu criticized the tendency of the 1960s to ‘draw freely on the profits of scientificity and the profits associated with the status of philosopher’ in using ‘the “-ology effect”’ – archaeology, grammatology and semiology – to give pseudo-empirical substance to theoretical speculation precisely at the time when, rather, it was necessary ‘to question the status of philosopher and all its prestige so as to carry out a true conversion into science’. In short, as Bourdieu put it, ‘although I made an attempt in my work to put into operation the structural or relational way of thinking in sociology, I resisted with all my might the merely fashionable forms of structuralism’ (1990: 6). Bourdieu also lectured on Durkheim and Saussure at the University of Algiers, but his interest, as in the case of the lectures on Kant, was methodological rather than systematic – he was ‘trying to establish the limits of attempts to produce “pure theories”’ (1990: 6).

Bourdieu confirmed many of these influences in a paper that he gave in Amsterdam in 1989. In the article that was subsequently published in English translation as ‘Thinking About Limits’, Bourdieu wrote:

What I now very quickly want to address is the epistemological tradition in which I have begun to work. This was for me like the air that we breathe, which is to say that it went unnoticed. It is a very local tradition tied to a number of French names: Koyr´e, Bachelard, Canguilhem and, if we go back a little, to Duhem. . . . This historical tradition of epistemology very strongly linked reflection on science with the history of science. Differently from the neo-positivist, Anglo-Saxon tradition, it was from the history of science that it isolated the principles of knowledge of scientific thought.

(1992a: 41)

This may have been a strategic statement, just as, equally, may have been the remarks offered in the 1985 interview. The 1985 interview was with, amongst others, Axel Honneth, who, at the time, was research assistant to J¨urgen Habermas, and Bourdieu may well have been wanting to emphasize the nature of his philosophical trajectory away from academic philosophy towards practising social anthropology precisely so as to differentiate his own position from that of

Habermas. Equally, the Amsterdam paper was presented at the time in which Bourdieu was seeking to emphasize the potential for universalization of the particular French tradition to which he belonged in opposition to the threat of universal conceptual domination posed by the American positivist tradition. This was the period of his engagement with American social science as manifested in Social Theory for a Changing Society, which he co-edited with James Coleman (Coleman and Bourdieu, 1989) following a conference held in Chicago, and, in particular, of Bourdieu’s Epilogue to that publication entitled ‘On the Possibility of a Field of World Sociology’. These are necessary caveats to be entered in relation to Bourdieu’s retrospective account in the late 1980s of his early intellectual development. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I want to examine some of Bourdieu’s earliest texts, especially some of those written between 1965 and 1975 during the period in which he developed his distinctive concepts and in which, I shall argue, he sought to reconcile his knowledge of the classical tradition of sociological explanation with his philosophical disposition to give social science a new kind of epistemological foundation.

Bourdieu’s First Book

The tension between philosophy and sociology had already been apparent in Bourdieu’s first book: Sociologie de l’Alg´erie (1958). As I have already indicated, Bourdieu’s intention was to transfer his philosophical interest in the phenomenological analysis of emotions and intersubjectivity to apply to the larger issues of cross-cultural adaptation that he witnessed in relation to the Algerian response to French colonial intervention in North Africa. He needed to establish a status quo ante of Algerian cultures in order, subsequently, to analyse processes of cultural adjustment. This was the motive forcing him to find ways of describing the traditional organization of Algerian tribes. A descriptive sociology was a necessary instrument to develop a descriptive phenomenology of acculturation processes.

Attention has always focused in particular on Bourdieu’s discussion of the Kabyle culture in the second chapter of his book. This is understandable because Kabyle culture was always a point of reference in his thinking, even, for instance, as late as in his contribution to the discussion of gender issues in La domination masculine (1998). Durkheim had also cited the Kabyles as evidence for the existence of the kind of mechanical solidarity that he called ‘politico-familial’ organization in Chapter 6 of The Division of Labour in Society (1933). Bourdieu did not cite Durkheim in the Bibliography or the text of Sociologie de l’Alg´erie, but the two sources of information cited by Durkheim (Hanoteau and Letourneux, 1873; Masqueray, 1886). It seems likely, therefore, that Bourdieu’s interpretation of the social organization of the Kabyles derived from the same sources as did Durkheim’s interpretation, but there is nothing to suggest that Bourdieu was endorsing Durkheim’s distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity or, indeed, that he was engaging directly with Durkheim’s text at all. By contrast,

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Bourdieu’s Bibliography does contain Weber’s Gesammelte Aufs¨atze zur Religionssoziologie (1920–1). Apart from the mention of several American texts on acculturation, the reference to Weber’s volume is the only explicitly theoretical one in the Bibliography. There are also many references to texts on Islamic law and Islamic religious practices (including Chelhod, 1958; Letourneau, 1950). The discussion of the Kabyles focuses on berber law but has no reference at all to religion.

It is the rather more neglected chapter on the Mozabite culture (Chapter 4) that mainly appears to be the product of Bourdieu’s reading in the secondary literature that he cited. His discussion of the Mozabites overtly operated with the language that is familiar to us from the first part of the Aufs¨atze that is separately published as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, 1930). Bourdieu started with the paradox of Mozabite culture – that it stimulated sophisticated and dispersed commercial activity across North Africa whilst retaining tight social and cultural cohesion. He sought to find the ‘why and the how’ of this paradox, and Weber’s interpretation of the relationship between Calvinism and capitalism provided a ready-made, off-the-peg explanation. The Mozabites were adherents of a heretical sect of Islam and the heresy was based on two principles derived from a strict interpretation of the Koran – that all believers are equal and that every action is either good or bad. On this basis, Bourdieu proceeded to describe the Mozabites as religious dissidents:

Thus these equalitarian rigorists, according to whom religion must be vivified not only by faith but also by works and purity of conscience, who attach great value to pious intention, who reject the worship of saints, who watch over the purity of morals with extreme severity, could be called the Protestants and Puritans of Islam.

(1958: 45/1962b: 39)

The adoption of Weberian terminology is blatant. The chapter has a sub-heading called ‘Puritanism and Capitalism’ and it concludes that the soul and the life of the Mozabites

. . . are organized around two distinct centers which stand in the same opposition as the sacred and the profane. Thus it is that the modernistic adaptation to the world of finance and business does not contradict the rigid traditionalism of the religious life but, on the contrary, preserves it and makes it possible.

(1958: 58/1962b: 54–5)

It needs to be said, of course, that Sociologie de l’Alg´erie was probably written quickly in difficult circumstances as the Algerian War of Independence was becoming more intense, and it also needs to be accepted that this was the first

publication of a relatively young man. The point is not so much the inadequacy of the analysis as the nature of the inadequacy. Bourdieu was prepared to use whatever sociological explanations were to hand and which seemed plausibly to fit the historical, ethnographic records with which he was working. He did not try rigorously to defend the analogy that he deployed between Kharedjite Abadhites and Calvinists, concentrating only on the formal similarities without referring to substantive differences between dissident Islam and dissident Christianity, precisely because his interest was not at all in the validity of the sociological explanation as such. Bourdieu’s accounts of the original social organization of the Algerian tribes were only of interest to him in as much as they could be regarded as objectifications of the putative subjective values of those people whom he was to interview in their new situations in Algiers. The accounts were discursive exercises. Although the first edition of the book was entitled Sociologie de l’Alg´erie, the English translation of 1962 was entitled The Algerians, by which time, also, the findings were differently presented. By 1962, Bourdieu, back in France, had attended some of the research seminars of L´evi-Strauss, and the English text contains diagrammatic representations of the social/spatial organization of a Kabyle house that anticipate ‘La maison kabyle ou le monde renvers´e’ (Bourdieu, 1970b). This was Bourdieu’s most ‘L´evi-Straussian’ article, but it subsequently became clear that there was no more conviction on his part about this ethnological gloss than there had been in his use of Weberian discourse. What we see in Bourdieu’s own critique of some of his earlier L´evi-Straussian pieces in the first part of Esquisse d’une th´eorie de la pratique (1972) is not so much the discovery of a new methodological position as the articulation of a position that was able to accommodate the artificiality of the explanatory discourses that he had exploited in his formative intellectual apprenticeship in North Africa. It is to this process of articulation that we must now turn.

‘Champ Intellectuel et projet createur’´

Bourdieu’s thought always developed within the framework of an intellectual matrix. He simultaneously pursued ideas within and between compartments so that, for instance, the articulation of his philosophy and methodology in respect of his Algerian anthropological research emerged in the early 1970s after a decade of research and reflection that could be thought to belong to the sociology of culture and education. The difficulty is to know where to break into this matrix so as to try to represent it. However, I take as my starting point the article that was first published in a special number of Les Temps Modernes in 1966 devoted to the ‘problems of structuralism’: ‘Champ intellectuel et projet cr´eateur’ (1966d). Since returning to France from Algeria, Bourdieu had published two books arising from his sociological work there, and also several articles that were pursuing lines of inquiry derived from the Algerian studies – notably in relation to time, honour and work. After several years lecturing at the University of Lille, Bourdieu was

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