Pierre Bourdieu
Our tastes, manners and ambitions are shaped by our social background, and this quietly passes inequality on from one generation to the next.
Placement
Showed how inequality is reproduced through taste, education and the body: habitus, field and the forms of capital explain why the “natural” feels natural.
Key ideas
- Habitus
- Social fields
- Economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital
- Symbolic violence
Influence
Influenced by 9
Blaise Pascal
influenced by
In Pascalian Meditations (1997) Bourdieu took Pascal as guide against the scholastic illusion of pure reason, drawing on his view that custom and the body make belief. P. Bourdieu, Méditations pascaliennes (1997); B. Pascal, Pensées (1670); SEP “Blaise Pascal”
Evidence: also in InPhO · InPhO
Blaise Pascal › 1623–1662
Karl Marx
influenced by ✓
Bourdieu widened Marx’s concept of capital beyond economics to cultural, social and symbolic capital, whose unequal distribution and conversion structure social space (1983; ‘The Forms of Capital’, 1986). P. Bourdieu, “Ökonomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital, soziales Kapital” (1983); “The Forms of Capital” (1986); La Distinction (1979)
Karl Marx › 1818–1883
Émile Durkheim
influenced by ✓
Bourdieu extended Durkheim and Mauss’s thesis on the social origin of classification schemes (1903) to the schemes of taste through which classes classify and are classified (Distinction, 1979). P. Bourdieu, La Distinction (1979), conclusion “Classes et classements”; É. Durkheim and M. Mauss, “De quelques formes primitives de classification”, L’Année sociologique 6 (1903)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Émile Durkheim › 1858–1917
Max Weber
influenced by ✓
Bourdieu recast Weber’s sociology of religion, with priest, prophet and sorcerer competing for legitimacy, as a religious field of struggles over symbolic power (1971). P. Bourdieu, “Genèse et structure du champ religieux”, Revue française de sociologie 12 (1971); “Une interprétation de la théorie de la religion selon Max Weber”, Archives européennes de sociologie 12 (1971)
Max Weber › 1864–1920
Ludwig Wittgenstein
influenced by ✓
Bourdieu invoked Wittgenstein on rule-following against a legalistic view of practice: agents act from a practical sense, not by obeying explicit rules (‘De la règle aux stratégies’, 1985). P. Bourdieu, “De la règle aux stratégies” (1985), in Choses dites (1987); Le sens pratique (1980); SEP “Ludwig Wittgenstein”
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Ludwig Wittgenstein › 1889–1951
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
influenced by ✓
Bourdieu drew on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body for practical sense and bodily hexis, belief enacted in posture and gesture, not represented (Le sens pratique, 1980). P. Bourdieu, Le sens pratique (1980); M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (1945); SEP “Maurice Merleau-Ponty”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty › 1908–1961
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Marcel Mauss
influenced by
Bourdieu took up Mauss’s habitus and techniques of the body and reread the gift as exchange whose economic truth is misrecognised (Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, 1972). P. Bourdieu, Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (1972); Le sens pratique (1980); M. Mauss, “Les techniques du corps” (1936); “Essai sur le don” (1925)
Evidence: AI draft
Marcel Mauss › 1872–1950
Gaston Bachelard
influenced by
Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron opened The Craft of Sociology (1968) with Bachelard’s epistemological break: sociology must construct its object against common-sense notions, reprinting extracts from his writings. P. Bourdieu, J.-C. Chamboredon and J.-C. Passeron, Le métier de sociologue (1968); G. Bachelard, La formation de l’esprit scientifique (1938)
Evidence: also in InPhO · InPhO
Gaston Bachelard › 1884–1962
Georges Canguilhem
influenced by ✓
Bourdieu registered a thesis on the temporal structures of affective life with Canguilhem, never completed, and drew on his historical epistemology (Esquisse pour une auto-analyse, 2004). P. Bourdieu, Esquisse pour une auto-analyse (2004); P. Bourdieu, J.-C. Chamboredon and J.-C. Passeron, Le métier de sociologue (1968)
Georges Canguilhem › 1904–1995
Influenced 3
Didier Eribon
influenced
In Returning to Reims (2009) Eribon used Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and social verdict to analyse his class origin, school as sorting and social mobility as painful conversion. D. Eribon, Retour à Reims (2009); P. Bourdieu, La Distinction (1979)
Evidence: AI draft
Didier Eribon › b. 1953
Eva Illouz
influenced
Illouz extended Bourdieu’s forms of capital to feelings: therapeutic culture makes emotional competence an ‘emotional capital’ convertible into social advantage (Cold Intimacies, 2007; Saving the Modern Soul, 2008). E. Illouz, Cold Intimacies (2007); Saving the Modern Soul (2008); P. Bourdieu, “Ökonomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital, soziales Kapital” (1983)
Evidence: AI draft
Eva Illouz › b. 1961
Andreas Reckwitz
influenced
Reckwitz built his theory of social practices on Bourdieu’s habitus and practical sense, treating society as routinised practices guided by implicit knowledge (‘Grundelemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken’, 2003). A. Reckwitz, “Grundelemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken”, Zeitschrift für Soziologie 32 (2003); Die Transformation der Kulturtheorien (2000)
Evidence: AI draft
Andreas Reckwitz › b. 1970
Criticism
Criticized by 2
Raewyn Connell
criticised by
Connell argued that Bourdieu’s reproduction theory explains stability through a ‘black box of habit’, leaving social change and struggle unexplained (Which Way Is Up?, 1983). R. W. Connell, “The Black Box of Habit on the Wings of History”, in Which Way Is Up? (1983); Southern Theory (2007), ch. 2
Evidence: AI draft
Raewyn Connell › b. 1944
Judith Butler
criticised by
Butler objected that Bourdieu ties the force of performative speech to prior institutional authority, leaving no room for subversive resignification (Excitable Speech, 1997; ‘Performativity’s Social Magic’, 1999). J. Butler, Excitable Speech (1997); “Performativity’s Social Magic”, in R. Shusterman (ed.), Bourdieu: A Critical Reader (1999)
Evidence: AI draft
Judith Butler › b. 1956
Criticizes 3
Martin Heidegger
criticised
Bourdieu read Heidegger’s ontology as a euphemised form of the Weimar ‘conservative revolution’, shaped by its author’s position in the academic field (L’ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger, 1988). P. Bourdieu, “L’ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger”, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 5–6 (1975); book 1988
Evidence: AI draft
Martin Heidegger › 1889–1976
Jean-Paul Sartre
criticised
Bourdieu criticised Sartre’s ‘imaginary anthropology of subjectivism’, in which free consciousness creates meaning at each instant, setting the habitus against it (The Logic of Practice, 1980). P. Bourdieu, Le sens pratique (1980), Book I, ch. 2
Evidence: AI draft
Jean-Paul Sartre › 1905–1980
Claude Lévi-Strauss
criticised
Bourdieu objected that Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism reduces practice to executing rules, ignoring the timing and strategies of gift exchange (Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1972). P. Bourdieu, Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (1972); Le sens pratique (1980), Book I, ch. 1
Evidence: AI draft
Claude Lévi-Strauss › 1908–2009
Works
Written with Jean-Claude Passeron: schools reward a familiarity with language and culture that children of educated families bring from home, and so turn inherited advantage into apparent individual merit – a “symbolic violence” that also those it disadvantages accept as legitimate.
- 1979Distinction
Survey data on French tastes, from music to food, show that judgements of taste mark and reproduce class – “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier”; its postscript criticises Kant’s aesthetics.
Position
Bourdieu set out to overcome the opposition between structuralism, which treats people as bearers of structures, and philosophies of the free subject such as Sartre’s existentialism. His key concept is habitus: a system of durable dispositions – ways of perceiving, judging, speaking and moving – acquired through one’s social position, mostly without awareness, and expressed as a practical “feel for the game”. People act in fields – art, science, politics, the economy – each a space of struggle with its own stakes. In these struggles they use different forms of capital: economic (money), cultural (education, knowledge, taste), social (connections) and symbolic (recognition). Distinction (1979), based on large surveys, showed that taste in music, food or furniture maps onto class: “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.” The cultivated taste of the educated appears natural and superior, which legitimises their position. Schools, as he and Jean-Claude Passeron showed, reward the cultural capital that privileged children bring from home and present the result as individual merit. Bourdieu called such domination, accepted because it is misrecognised, “symbolic violence”, and later applied the idea to the relations between the sexes.
Life & context
Pierre Bourdieu was born in 1930 in Denguin, a village in the Béarn in south-western France, whose father, from a family of small farmers, worked for the post office. A scholarship pupil, he entered the École normale supérieure in Paris and passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1954. Military service in Algeria during the war of independence turned him into an ethnologist and sociologist: he studied Kabyle society and the upheavals of colonial war and taught at the University of Algiers. Back in France he taught at Lille and from 1964 at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris, where he built up his own research centre. In 1981 he was elected to the chair of sociology at the Collège de France. In the 1990s he became a prominent public critic of neoliberalism. He died in Paris in 2002.
Further main works
- The Inheritors (with Jean-Claude Passeron, 1964)
- Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972)
- The Logic of Practice (1980)
- The Weight of the World (ed., 1993)
- Masculine Domination (1998)
Appears in
- Journey ‘How Society Became Thinkable’ · Stop 11 of 12
- Debate ‘Do We Deserve Our Success? Meritocracy’
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