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

“Hierocratic Domination and Political Domination”’ (Bourdieu, 1971a: 7 fn.7/ 1987: 135 fn. 3). Again, Bourdieu was suggesting that Weber instinctively appreciated that there were competitions for dominance that could only be described in terms of interaction and could not be analysed typologically.

The example Bourdieu chose here to suggest the inadequacy of Weber’s methodology is significant because the relations between peasants and towndwellers were the objects of his analysis in his Algerian work as well as in ‘C´elibat et condition paysanne’ (Bourdieu, 1962a), and the difference between the ‘structuralist’ comparative analysis of the universalized concept of the ‘peasant condition’ and the analysis of the structure of relations within particular systems constituting the ‘peasant position’ was the starting point for the general discussion in ‘Condition de classe et position de classe’ (1966b). What Bourdieu was arguing here in respect of religious interests, he was also saying in respect of the political field in ‘L’opinion publique n’existe pas’ (1971c).

A final example of Bourdieu’s critique of Weber relates to the notion of ‘charisma’. Bourdieu wrote:

As well as occasionally succumbing to the na¨ıve representation of charisma as a mysterious quality inherent in a person or as a gift of nature . . . even in his most rigorous writings Max Weber never proposes anything other than a psycho-sociological theory of charisma, a theory that regards it as the lived relation of a public to the charismatic personality. . . .

(1971a: 14–15/1987: 129)

Bourdieu’s claim was that Weber, at best, regarded charisma as something that was invested in an individual by a social group. By contrast, Bourdieu contended that charisma has to be understood to be an attribute that is comprehended scientifically in terms of the objective structure of relations by which it is constituted. It is measurable abstractly like a magnetic force and not by recourse to social psychological interpretation. He concluded:

Let us then dispose once and for all of the notion of charisma as a property attaching to the nature of a single individual and examine instead, in each particular case, sociologically pertinent characteristics of an individual biography. The aim in this context is to explain why a particular individual finds himself socially predisposed to live out and express with particular cogency and coherence, ethical or political dispositions that are already present in a latent state amongst all the members of the class or group of his addressees.

(1971a: 16/1987: 131)

In subjecting the work of Weber to an epistemological critique, Bourdieu was consolidating the sociological methodology advanced in his ‘Structuralism

and Theory of Sociological Knowledge’ (1968c). Bourdieu would appear to have been repudiating the implicit phenomenology of his early fieldwork and the L´eviStraussian philosophical ethnology of his texts of the early 1960s, and legitimating himself as the spokesperson, expressing himself ‘with particular cogency and coherence’, for the new philosophical sociology that was the product of the social and historical developments he had outlined in ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945’ (1967a). The situation was, I believe, more complicated than this, and the complexity has to be discussed in order to approach a proper understanding of Bourdieu’s position in relation to the classical tradition of sociology. He positioned himself within sociology by reference to a perceived inadequacy of Weber’s methodology. Weber’s use of ‘types’ was an artificial or arbitrary imposition on phenomena that possessed inherent systemic meaning. In defining the boundaries of sociological explanation, however, Bourdieu was aware that sociological explanation as such represented a discursive imposition that was as artificial or arbitrary as ‘typological’ imposition within the discourse.

‘The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge’

In spite of Bourdieu’s criticism of Merleau-Ponty in ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945’, he was only strategically renouncing his earlier phenomenological interests. The philosophical influence of Merleau-Ponty’s La structure du comportement (1942) was particularly evident in ‘C´elibat et condition paysanne’ (1962a) and in Bourdieu’s development of the concepts of habitus and hexis, whilst Merleau-Ponty’s La ph´enom´enologie de perception (1945) was reworked in Bourdieu’s ‘El´ements d’une th´eorie sociologique de la perception artistique’ (1968b). At the same time as Bourdieu was defining the limits of social scientific explanation, he was also reflecting on the pre-logical, ontological realities that social science purported to describe. The framework of Le m´etier de sociologue (1968a) was based on an adoption of Bachelard’s emphasis on the need to make epistemological breaks so as to understand the social conditions of production of scientific explanation. It appeared, therefore, to advocate a sociology of sociology or a reflexive sociology as a necessary procedure for constructing and verifying sociological findings. The epistemological breaks were presented as the means by which sociological explanation could be refined. However, by the time that Bourdieu published ‘The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge’ in 1973, the epistemological breaks were serving a broader purpose. They were functioning to allow the sociological analysis of sociological objectivism to become a means by which ontic realities might be disclosed. The dense passage is familiar but needs to be presented in full:

The social world may be subjected to three modes of theoretical knowledge, each of which implies a set of (usually tacit) anthropological theses. The only thing these modes of knowledge have in common is that they all

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stand in opposition to practical knowledge. The mode of knowledge we shall term phenomenological (or, if one prefers to speak in terms of currently active schools, ‘interactionist’ or ‘ethnomethodological’) makes explicit primary experience of the social world: perception of the social world as natural and self-evident is not self-reflective by definition and excludes all interrogation about its own conditions of possibility. At a second level, objectivist knowledge (of which the structuralist hermeneutic constitutes a particular case) constructs the objective relations (e.g. economic or linguistic) structuring not only practices but representations of practices and in particular primary knowledge, practical and tacit, of the familiar world, by means of a break with this primary knowledge and, hence, with those tacitly assumed presuppositions which confer upon the social world its self-evident and natural character. Objectivist knowledge can only grasp the objective structures of the social world, and the objective truth of primary experience (from which explicit knowledge of these structures is absent) provided it poses the very problem doxic experience of the social world excludes by definition, namely the problem of the (specific) conditions under which this experience is possible. Thirdly, what we might refer to as praxeological knowledge is concerned not only with the system of objective relations constructed by the objectivist form of knowledge, but also with the dialectical relationships between these objective structures and the structured dispositions which they produce and which tend to reproduce them, i.e. the dual process of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality. This knowledge presupposes a break with the objectivist knowledge, that is, it presupposes investigation into the conditions of possibility and, consequently, into the limits of the objectivistic viewpoint which grasps practices from the outside, as a fait accompli, rather than construct their generative principle by placing itself inside the process of their accomplishment.

(1973: 53–4)

The Phenomenological Context

The way to make sense of this passage is to set it in a phenomenological context. Robert Sokolowski’s brilliantly lucid Introduction to Phenomenology (2000) helps us to understand what Bourdieu was doing in this passage. In a chapter entitled ‘An Initial Statement of What Phenomenology Is’, Sokolowski argues that in order to understand what phenomenology is,

. . . we must make a distinction between two attitudes or perspectives that we can adopt. We must distinguish between the natural attitude and the phenomenological attitude. The natural attitude is the focus we have when we are involved in our original, world-directed stance, when we

intend things, situations, facts, and any other kinds of objects. . . . We do not move into it from anything more basic. The phenomenological attitude, on the other hand, is the focus we have when we reflect upon the natural attitude and all the intentionalities that occur within it. It is within the phenomenological attitude that we carry out philosophical analyses. The phenomenological attitude is also sometimes called the transcendental attitude.

(2000: 42)

Sokolowski clarifies the relationship between the two attitudes by specifying more clearly the distinguishing characteristics of the phenomenological attitude:

There are many different viewpoints and attitudes even within the natural attitude. There is the viewpoint of ordinary life, there is the viewpoint of the mathematician, that of the medical specialist, the physicist, the politician, and so on. . . . But the phenomenological attitude is not like any of these. It is more radical and comprehensive. All the other shifts in viewpoint and focus remain cushioned by our underlying world belief, which always remains in force, and all the shifts define themselves as moving from one viewpoint into another among the many that are open to us. The shift into the phenomenological attitude, however, is an ‘all or nothing’ kind of move that disengages completely from the natural attitude and focuses, in a reflective way, on everything in the natural attitude, including the underlying world belief.

(2000: 47)

Viewed from this perspective, the first epistemological break advocated by Bourdieu in ‘The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge’ enables objectivist scientific knowledge, but the objectivism remains within the domain of natural attitudes. The second epistemological break, however, enables an entirely different perspective to be achieved in relation to all natural attitudes. By this reconciliation or synthesis of a philosophy of science derived from Bachelard and the process of phenomenological reduction derived from Husserl, Bourdieu was able to maintain a strictly subjectless or anti-humanist methodology of social science whilst allowing for the agency of beings within a life-world. Bourdieu’s criticism of Merleau-Ponty and L´evi-Strauss had been that they both allowed their philosophical positions to distort the truly positivist scientificity of sociological investigation. His accommodation of philosophy and sociology allowed for a clear demarcation between the possible achievements of sociology and ontology. Bourdieu’s second epistemological break is not a meta-scientific posture within the field of sociology. Instead, it represents a sociological way to phenomenological reduction. Sokolowski suggests that phenomenology offers two possible ways to achieve ‘reduction’, ‘bracketing’ or the epoch´. The first is a Cartesian way

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that subjects all to doubt, and the second is an ‘ontological way to reduction’ that ‘helps us to complete the partial sciences. We move out to wider and wider contexts, until we come to the kind of widest context provided by the phenomenological attitude’ (2000: 53). Bourdieu’s insistence that ‘tout est social’ (1992c) enabled him to identify ontological and sociological analysis such that he tried to subject all discourses to sociological reduction without privileging the sociological practices of the natural attitude.

Bourdieu’s dual use of sociological inquiry has to be clearly stated. This dual function explains the way in which throughout his career he sought to shift intellectual perspective between differing public discourses or fields, sometimes presenting himself as an anthropologist, a sociolinguist, a cultural sociologist or philosopher, without relinquishing his fundamental commitment to a sociological approach. He approached the Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (Gouldner, 1971) in the perspective of Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1970).

Summary

This article has focused on the brief period in which Bourdieu was both legitimating himself within the field of sociology and simultaneously laying the foundations for a ‘theory of practice’ that would subject all scientific discourses to philosophical scrutiny. Although there is clear evidence for the suggestion here that Bourdieu appropriated phenomenological thinking and grafted it to the philosophy of science, it also has to be firmly said that he did not share the transcendental dispositions of either Husserl or of some of the neo-Kantians. Although he took advantage of the descriptive procedures of phenomenological analysis, Bourdieu did not, unlike Husserl, believe that phenomenology secured the supreme status of philosophy. As Sokolowski puts it: ‘To move into the phenomenological attitude is not to become a specialist in one form of knowledge or another, but to become a philosopher’ (2000: 47).

Bourdieu wrote The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (1991) to show that Heideggerian philosophy could be subjected to sociological/ phenomenological reduction, and Pascalian Meditations (2000) was also an attempt to celebrate the kind of philosophizing that would not become ossified as academic philosophy. The truth, therefore, must be that Bourdieu exploited phenomenology whilst rejecting its transcendental pretensions. In effect, phenomenological reduction was, for him, an heuristic device within the natural attitude that owed its pragmatic results to claims of transcendence that he did not accept. We can conclude that Bourdieu’s relationship to the classical tradition of Western European sociology was unique. As he sometimes stated, he was an ‘oblate’ – someone who could not fully let go of the intellectual position into which he had been initiated, in spite of his scepticism. It remains to be seen whether Bourdieu’s ambivalent resolution of his personal, social and intellectual

inheritance – his habitus – will continue to provide the paradigm that we need for an ongoing synergy between social research and philosophical reflection. If a conclusion is appropriate when all situations require continuous intellectual adjustments, my view would be that Bourdieu was aware that international social, political and cultural developments are occurring that cannot readily be understood by reference to a circumscribed discourse (sociology) generated in one particular place and time (Western Europe from the middle of the 19th century). The insight that I have explored in this article was that we now urgently need to construct shared discourses that seek to theorize internationally shared experiences expressed in particular and different conceptual languages. Bourdieu’s

R´eponses: Pour une anthropologie r´eflexive (1992b) was translated as An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. The English title missed Bourdieu’s point, and his emphasis needs to be the starting-point for an endeavour that will have the possibility of reviving social theory internationally without simply endorsing our local sociological tradition.

Notes

1.Throughout this text I refer to all collaborative publications with which Bourdieu was involved as if they were the work of Bourdieu alone. The full details of authorship are given in the bibliography. For a discussion of the way in which Bourdieu stimulated collaborative activity, see the interview between Bourdieu and Yvette Delsaut in Delsaut and Riviere` (2002: 177–239).

2.This is my translation. The footnote does not appear in the English translation of the article (Bourdieu, 1987). Another footnote in this English translation indicates that it is a ‘slightly modified’ version of the original French article and was written in 1985.

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Derek Robbins is Professor of International Social Theory at the University of East London, where he also is Director of the Group for the Study of International Social Science in the School of Social Sciences. He is the author of The Work of Pierre Bourdieu (1991) and of Bourdieu and Culture (2000); the editor of the four-volume collection of articles on Bourdieu in the Sage Masters of Contemporary Social Thought series (2000); as well as author of many articles on Bourdieu’s work. He is currently editing two further collections of articles in the Sage Masters of Contemporary Social Thought series: the first set on Jean-

François Lyotard; and the other a second, post-mortem, set on Bourdieu. He is writing a book on The Internationalization of French Social Thought, 1950–2000 and is researching the influence of the French reception of Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophy on the development of French social science.

Address: School of Social Sciences, University of East London, Longbridge Road, Dagenham, Essex RM8 2AS, UK. [email: d.m.robbins@uel.ac.uk]

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