Pierre Bourdieu And Democratic Politics

Pierre Bourdieu was a brilliant sociologist and social thinker; he was also an intensely political man whose work is of profound significance for rethinking democracy. This original volume presents and develops Bourdieu's distinctive contribution to the theory and practice of democratic politics. It explicates and illustrates his core concepts of political field and field of power, his historical model of the bureaucratic state, and his influential analyses of the practices and institutions involved in the paradoxical phenomenon of political representation - starting with the enigma of delegation, or what he called the "mystery of ministry." The fruitfulness of Bourdieu's approach is demonstrated in a series of integrated studies of voting, public opinion polls, party dynamics, class rule, and state-building, as well as by careful analyses of Bourdieu's own civic engagements and his theoretical treatment of the politics of reason and recognition in contemporary society. Charting the connections between Bourdieu's political views, the main nodes of his sociology of democratic representation, and the implications of this sociology for progressive civic thought and action, this book will be of interest to students and scholars across the gamut of disciplines as well as to citizens concerned with renewing struggles for social justice.

Power is the central organizing principle of all social life, from culture and education to stratification and taste. And there is no more prominent name in the analysis of power than that of noted sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Throughout his career, Bourdieu challenged the commonly held view that symbolic power—the power to dominate—is solely symbolic. He emphasized that symbolic power helps create and maintain social hierarchies, which form the very bedrock of political life. By the time of his death in 2002, Bourdieu had become a leading public intellectual, and his argument about the more subtle and influential ways that cultural resources and symbolic categories prevail in power arrangements and practices had gained broad recognition. In Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals, David L. Swartz delves deeply into Bourdieu’s work to show how central—but often overlooked—power and politics are to an understanding of sociology. Arguing that power and politics stand at the core of Bourdieu’s sociology, Swartz illuminates Bourdieu’s political project for the social sciences, as well as Bourdieu’s own political activism, explaining how sociology is not just science but also a crucial form of political engagement.

In the last decade of his career, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu became involved in a series of high-profile political interventions, defending the cause of striking students and workers, speaking out in the name of illegal immigrants, the homeless and the unemployed, challenging the incursion of the market into the field of artistic and intellectual production. The first sustained analysis of Bourdieu's politics, this study seeks to assess the validity of his claims as to the distinctiveness and superiority of his own field theory as a tool of political analysis.

What is the nature of the modern state? How did it come into being and what are the characteristics of this distinctive field of power that has come to play such a central role in the shaping of all spheres of social, political and economic life? In this major work the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu addresses these fundamental questions. Modifying Max Weber’s famous definition, Bourdieu defines the state in terms of the monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence, where the monopoly of symbolic violence is the condition for the possession and exercise of physical violence. The state can be reduced neither to an apparatus of power in the service of dominant groups nor to a neutral site where conflicting interests are played out: rather, it constitutes the form of collective belief that structures the whole of social life. The ‘collective fiction’ of the state Ð a fiction with very real effects - is at the same time the product of all struggles between different interests, what is at stake in these struggles, and their very foundation. While the question of the state runs through the whole of Bourdieu’s work, it was never the subject of a book designed to offer a unified theory. The lecture course presented here, to which Bourdieu devoted three years of his teaching at the Collège de France, fills this gap and provides the key that brings together the whole of his research in this field. This text also shows ‘another Bourdieu’, both more concrete and more pedagogic in that he presents his thinking in the process of its development. While revealing the illusions of ‘state thought’ designed to maintain belief in government being oriented in principle to the common good, he shows himself equally critical of an ‘anti-institutional mood’ that is all too ready to reduce the construction of the bureaucratic apparatus to the function of maintaining social order. At a time when financial crisis is facilitating the hasty dismantling of public services, with little regard for any notion of popular sovereignty, this book offers the critical instruments needed for a more lucid understanding of the wellsprings of domination.

Preface by Pierre Bourdieu Preface by Loic J.D. Wacquant I Toward a Social Praxeology: The Structure and Logic of Bourdieu's Sociology, Loic J.D. Wacquant 1 Beyond the Antinomy of Social Physics and Social Phenomenology 2 Classification Struggles and the Dialectic of Social and Mental Structures 3 Methodological Relationalism 4 The Fuzzy Logic of Practical Sense 5 Against Theoreticism and Methodologism: Total Social Science 6 Epistemic Reflexivity 7 Reason, Ethics, and Politics II The Purpose of Reflexive Sociology (The Chicago Workshop), Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J.D. Wacquant 1 Sociology as Socioanalysis 2 The Unique and the Invariant 3 The Logic of Fields 4 Interest, Habitus, Rationality 5 Language, Gender, and Symbolic Violence 6 For a, Realpolitik of Reason 7 The Personal is Social III The Practice of Reflexive Sociology (The Paris Workshop), Pierre Bourdieu 1 Handing Down a Trade 2 Thinking Relationally 3 A Radical Doubt 4 Double Bind and Conversion 5 Participant Objectivation Appendixes, Loic J.D. Wacquant 1 How to Read Bourdieu 2 A Selection of Articles from, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 3 Selected Recent Writings on Pierre Bourdieu.

Bourdieu and Historical Analysis explores the usefulness of Pierre Bourdieus thought for analyzing not only the reproduction of social structures but also large-scale sociohistorical change.

In this series of trenchant essays, Pierre Bourdieu continues the urgent project begun in Acts of Resistance. Dissecting the claims of neoliberalism, Bordieu calls for an international social movement capable of forming a counterforce to the project of capitalist globalisation.

Table of Contents Introduction Gisèle Sapiro ix Part I On Journalism and Television 1 Journalism and Politics 3 On Television 11 The Olympics-an Agenda for Analysis 62 The Power of Journalism 65 From Miscellany to a Matter of State 75 Questions of Words 78 Part II Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market 83 To the Reader 85 The Left Hand and the Right Hand of the State 86 Sollers tel quel 94 The Status of Foreigners: A Shibboleth 97 Abuse of Power by the Advocates of Reason 100 The Train Driver's Remark 102 Against the Destruction of a Civilization 104 The Myth of "Globalization" and the European Welfare State 108 The Thoughts of Chairman Tietmeyer 121 Social Scientists, Economic Science, and the Social Movement 127 For a New Internationalism 133 Return to Television 141 The Government Finds the People Irresponsible 147 Job Insecurity Is Everywhere Now 149 The Protest Movement of the Unemployed, a Social Miracle 155 The Negative Intellectual 158 Neoliberalism, the Utopia (Becoming a Reality) of Unlimited Exploitation 160 Part III Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2 171 Letter to the American Reader 173 Preface 175 For a Scholarship with Commitment 179 The Imposition of the American Model and Its Effects 186 The Invisible Hand of the Powerful 191 Against the Policy of Depoliticization 200 For a European Social Movement 212 Grains of Sand 220 Culture Is in Danger 222 Unite and Rule 234 Part IV Interviews and New Acts of Resistance 245 For a Real Mobilization of Organized Forces 247 For a Permanent Organization of Resistance to the New World Order 251 The Intellectual Is Not Ethically Neutral 255 A Sociologist in the World 261 Epilogue: Remembering Pierre Bourdieu Craig Calhoun 279 Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson's Translator's Note: On Television 288 References 291 Notes 295 Permissions 309