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

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established as a lecturer in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and as a researcher in Aron’s research group, the Centre de Sociologie Europ´eenne. He had undertaken studies of the experience of students in French higher education, particularly students of philosophy and sociology at the University of Lille when he was teaching there. The same mixture of concerns was present in this work as had been present in the Algerian research. Les h´eritiers: les etudiants´ et la culture

(1964) focused on the curriculum as a mechanism of acculturation, and Bourdieu published the results of questionnaires that attempted to generate a profile of the cultures of students prior to their academic studies. He had been involved with a project on photography and photographic clubs, which resulted in the publication of Un art moyen: les usages sociaux de la photographie in 1965, and also with a project analysing the attendance at French, and then selected European, museums/art galleries, which resulted in the publication of L’amour de l’art in 1966 (1966a). That year saw the publication of ‘Condition de classe et position de classe’ (1966b) and ‘Une sociologie de l’action est-elle possible?’ (1966c), both of which were essentially theoretical, the former in relation to structuralism and the latter in opposition to Alain Touraine, but there had been very little reason to anticipate the developed argument of ‘Champ intellectuel et projet cr´eateur’ – neither the articulation of the concept of ‘field’ nor the application to cultural history. The opening paragraph needs to be given in full. Bourdieu began:

In order that the sociology of intellectual and artistic creation be assigned its proper object and at the same time its limits, the principle must be perceived and stated that the relationship between a creative artist and his work, and therefore his work itself, is affected by the system of social relations within which creation as an act of communication takes place, or to be more precise, by the position of the creative artist in the structure of the intellectual field (which is itself, in part at any rate, a function of his past work, and the reception it has met with). The intellectual field, which cannot be reduced to a simple aggregate of isolated agents or to the sum of the elements merely juxtaposed, is, like a magnetic field, made up of a system of power lines. In other words, the constituting agents or systems of agents may be described as so many forces which, by their existence, opposition or combination, determine its specific structure at a given moment in time. In return, each of these is defined by its particular position within this field from which it derives positional properties which cannot be assimilated to intrinsic properties. Each is also defined by a specific type of participation in the cultural field taken as a system of relations between themes and problems; it is a determined type of cultural unconscious, while at the same time it intrinsically possesses what could be called a functional weight, because its own ‘mass’, that is, its power (or

better, its authority) in the field cannot be defined independently of its position within it.

(1966d: 865/1971d: 161)

This was a new voice and a new approach. Bourdieu was announcing that the sociology of knowledge in general and of artistic production in particular should not be predicated on the autonomisation of historical producers studied in relation to a currently imposed construction of their supposed social contexts. Rather it should be founded on the analysis of those impersonal, objective systems within which communication takes place and within which meanings are immanently established. Although Bourdieu cited Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) in his article, nevertheless that book exemplified the approach that he was seeking to criticize. For Bourdieu, Williams’s work placed texts and authors that had been selected, evaluated and esteemed within the literary critical discourse of high culture in relation to a hypostatized context that was the construct of the equally high-culture discourse of social and economic history. The resulting ‘sociology of literature’ was not an analysis of the system of historical social relations within which texts functioned but, instead, a current construction of a representation of the past that was dependent on elements that had been falsely rendered independent and that functioned ideologically in the present as a creative project within a present intellectual field. Bourdieu’s fundamental objection was to the post hoc or detached imposition of a structure on phenomena that, in fact, participate in the construction of their own structures.

Although this summary represents the emphasis of Bourdieu’s position, it is, nevertheless, falsely realist. Bourdieu’s opening sentence is very important in indicating the epistemology that he was taking for granted. There are two components. There is, first of all, the insistence that sociological analysis entails the analysis of the system of social relations within which individuals operate and within which their individualities are defined, but, secondly, there is the insistence that this way of seeing intellectual and artistic production is a necessary corollary of adopting a sociological perspective. The ‘principle must be perceived and stated’ concerning the boundaries of sociological explanation rather in terms comparable to mathematical proof. There is no claim here that reality is being analysed. The account of reality that is disclosed by sociology is a function of the sociological mode of perception. It does not exclude other modes of perceiving the same phenomena and offering alternative accounts of those phenomena. Bourdieu was clearly committed to the sociological account that he was explicating but, nevertheless, the attainment of dominance in representations of reality had nothing to do with the objective phenomena and everything to do with the conflict between modes of perception or the contest between faculties. Although the opening half-sentence may seem an almost casual introduction, it does disclose Bourdieu’s attachment to a neo-Kantian epistemology and, already, a willingness to apply that epistemology reflexively. As we shall see, it was also a neo-

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Kantianism that was derived from the Marburg School and, in particular, Ernst Cassirer, rather than from Rickert, Windelband and the south-west German School of neo-Kantianism. Rickert had written The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science (1986) in order to argue that contingent individual behaviour in history could be analysed not by adopting the procedures of natural science but only by adopting an alternative methodology specific to and inherent in the different phenomena. Bourdieu appears to have believed, instead, that delimitations of explanatory discourses are themselves historically contingent. Limits have to be acknowledged and declared, but they are not intrinsic. Bourdieu’s disquiet about Weber’s methodology derives, in part, from the latter’s attachment to the philosophical orientation of the south-west German neo-Kantian School. Bourdieu’s neo-Kantianism merged with Bachelard’s historical epistemology and resisted transcendentalism. We have to accept that we proceed ‘as if’ sociological explanation were valid (to use the title of a text by another influential neoKantian, Hans Vaihinger [1924]), but we seek to make this provisionality dominant for extraneous reasons.

Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945

There is no need to consider further here the substance of ‘Champ intellectuel et projet cr´eateur’. For our purposes, the introductory passage of the article clarifies Bourdieu’s purpose in writing ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945: Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without Subject’ in the following year (1967a). This was an article that was never published in French but only, internationally, in Social Research. Within the international field of sociology, Bourdieu was seeking to offer an ‘insider’ view of the sub-field of French sociology to an ‘outsider’ readership. Within the article, therefore, he attempted to provide an objective social history of intellectual relations in France between 1945 and 1966 from a systematically sociological perspective adopted at the end of this period, whilst, at the same time, he endeavoured to contextualize his own intellectual agency during those years. The experiment was as much an attempt in the intellectual field to explore the boundaries of subjectivity and objectivity as, in the anthropological field, his ‘C´elibat et condition paysanne’ (1962a) had been in respect of the social situation in his native B´earn. Publication in Social Research was an attempt to place the article outside the immediate field of production and consumption that was the object of the article’s inquiry. The connection with ‘Champ intellectuel et projet cr´eateur’ was made explicit in the opening paragraph. From the outset, therefore, the methodology adopted in the article was linked to the position that Bourdieu had already articulated within the social and intellectual trajectory under consideration:

The reader will find in this paper neither a systematic history of the sociological or philosophical events and schools which have succeeded one

another in France since 1945, nor a philosophy of the history of philosophy or of the history of sociology, but a sociology of the main trends of sociology which, in order to restore their full meaning to works and to doctrines, tries to relate them to their cultural context, in other words, tries to show how positions and oppositions in the intellectual field are connected with explicitly or implicitly philosophical attitudes. It is with this in mind that we have prepared this outline of a sociology of French sociology, which aims at uncovering unconscious affinities rather than describing declared affiliations, and at deciphering implicit purposes rather than accepting literally declarations of intent.

(1967a: 162)

As this passage indicates, Bourdieu’s article focused on the changing relations between philosophy and sociology in the particular socio-economic conditions of post-World War II France. In Les h´eritiers (1964), Bourdieu had already inspected the social contingency of the student selection of these subjects of study, and it could be said that he was now analysing the social contingency of how these subjects were themselves constituted for student consumption. It was an approach that anticipated the abstract discussion of the ‘arbitrariness’ of curriculum content in La reproduction (1970a), but the constant, tacit frame of reference was Bourdieu’s own position-taking between the two intellectual disciplines – the one within which he was trained and the other that he was employed to transmit. The sub-text of his argument and of his position-taking related to the contemporary vogue for quantitative sociological research ‘as it has developed in the United States’. He contended, however, that such research ‘is ultimately nothing but a neo-positivism that seeks its guarantee in American sociology and civilization’ (1967a: 164). He claimed, in other words, that the apparent indifference of American empirical social science to philosophy and theoretical speculation was predicated on positivist philosophy. Bourdieu found it ironical that empirical social science could only re-establish itself in France by resurrecting the antiphilosophical philosophy of the Comtist tradition.

The view that Bourdieu tried to express in the article was, essentially, that the empiricist social science that was a form of neo-positivism was inadequate precisely because it was founded on an inadequate philosophy of social science. What was required was a new kind of empirical practice grounded in postpositivist philosophy of science. Again, the irony for Bourdieu was that structuralism had generated humanist reaction because, like Durkheimianism, it seemed to treat social facts as things, but the shortcoming of structuralism, as of Durkheimianism, was that it was methodologically insufficiently anti-humanist. Bourdieu paid specific attention to some articles by Merleau-Ponty, and argued that in his ‘De Mauss a` L´evi-Strauss’ (1959) Merleau-Ponty ‘granted ethnology its philosophical emancipation, but he did not fail to reserve to philosophy the right to re-interpret – or, better, to arouse – the existential significance of the

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inanimate structures built up or discovered by the ethnologist’ (1967a: 167). Bourdieu claimed that the accommodation between existential philosophy and social science achieved by the intellectuals of the previous generation was one that preserved freedom and voluntarism within a pseudo-scientistic and pseudodeterministic structural analysis whereas what was needed was the delimitation of a social science theory and practice that, by concentrating on the systemic relationalism of observed phenomena, would rule out any explanatory recourse to the supposition of the existence of free human agency within those systems. Such a supposition was, for Bourdieu, an interpolation from outside the immanent system that was merely a projection of the disposition towards existentialist philosophy on the part of the ‘scientific’ observers.

Bourdieu accused L´evi-Strauss of the same underlying humanist orientation, arguing that he ‘brought out in the role of the ethnologist what must have surpassed the fondest expectations of a phenomenologist’ (1967a: 167) in the following passage from his Foreword to Sociologie et anthropologie:

The apprehension (which cannot be objective) of the unconscious forms of the activity of the mind nevertheless leads to subjectivation; for, after all, it is a similar process that, in psychoanalysis, enables us to recover our self, however alienated and, in ethnological investigation, to reach the most alien of other persons as if he were another self of ours.

(L´evi-Strauss, 1950: xxxi, quoted in Bourdieu, 1967a: 167)

Bourdieu proceeded to argue that this humanist social science found support in the intellectual climate of the years of Occupation, Resistance and Liberation. The existential philosophy that was homologuous with social and political experience during the period of its production did a disservice to social science by downgrading it for 15 years. Bourdieu discussed the stance adopted by Sartre and was only prepared to acknowledge that the latter’s intellectual endeavours were beneficial in ‘breaking with the canonical rules and subject-matter of university philosophy’, which had the effect of liberating ‘anthropological science from the conventions that had held it prisoner’ (1967a: 180).

This was an influence that Bourdieu was recognizing as of latent value for his own project, but the article looked next at the reaction to existentialism in the early 1960s and he claimed that the emergent empirical sociology in France ‘was founded on the illusion of a first beginning and, by the same token, on ignorance of the epistemological problems posed by any scientific practice, as well as on deliberate or unwitting disregard of the theoretical past of European science’ (1967a: 184). This epistemological ignorance was encouraged by the social and economic conditions in which public and private bureaucracies began to look to sociology to provide legitimation of their policy intentions. Bourdieu quoted Lucien Goldmann’s then recent comment that ‘future historians will probably identify the years 1955 to 1960 as the sociological turning-point in France

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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