Bourdieu: twenty years later, a work still on the job<

On January 23, 2002, one of the greatest contemporary sociologists and intellectuals disappeared in Paris: Pierre Bourdieu.

We must briefly recall the singular trajectory of the son of a modest family from Béarn born in 1930, that excellent school results will lead to significant mobility, inseparably social and geographical, and lead him to attend the most prestigious establishments: high school Louis-le-Grand, Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and, finally, the College de France with, in the meantime, contrasting social experiences as a high school teacher in Moulins, the University of Lille and as a conscript in Algeria.

The same mobility characterizes his intellectual career. Trained in philosophy, Pierre Bourdieu gradually freed himself from intellectual speculation to gradually turn to the social sciences, then much less prestigious, and explore all the methodological possibilities: ethnography (observation, interviews), statistics , archives, but also theoretical work which will allow him to invent new concepts thanks to which he will deliver caustic analyzes of the educational system, cultural practices, artistic worlds and, more generally, mechanisms of domination.

Under the sign of the field

It is important to note, in accordance with the method advocated by the sociologist himself, that this trajectory is inseparable from the transformations of the institutional spaces in which it took place, which has been well analyzed by some of his intellectual biographers1. In other words, Pierre Bourdieu is as much the “product” of the fields – intellectual, scientific, academic in particular – in which he evolved, as he has contributed to modifying their operating rules.

This concept of field is precisely the heart of a theoretical approach that he never ceased to develop, apply and refine in a number of books and articles – published in particular in the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales that he created and which remains to this day one of the most important in the discipline.

Another institutional heritage: the European Center for Sociology and Political Science (CESSP), one of the most important in France in these fields, which descends directly from the Center for European Sociology (CSE), founded by Raymond Aron but which Pierre Bourdieu headed for many years, and of the Center for the Sociology of Education and Culture which he created in 1968.

In 1995, Pierre Bourdieu undertook the drafting of a work of synthesis which he did not have time to complete, but which several of his followers endeavored to reconstitute from the plan and various writings, published or not, that he left.

Entitled Microcosmes, this posthumous work which appears these days at the editions Reasons to act - another legacy of this true scientific entrepreneur that was Pierre Bourdieu - develops this approach of society as a set of small autonomous worlds, the famous fields, made up of relations between the agents who participate in it, united by the sharing of a common interest in playing the "game", the Illusio, and at the same time classified according to the volume of a specific resource, which Pierre Bourdieu described as " capital ".

In each field, be it economic, artistic, scientific or religious, the dominators strive to maintain their monopoly on the definition of the "rules of the game" which ensure their pre-eminence, while the marginal agents seek, on the contrary, to subvert these which generates a chronic instability at the same time as the production of particular habitus, in other words a set of coherent dispositions to act, feel and think in a certain way more or less adjusted to the rules of the field in which one evolves depending on its position.

From theory to the field and vice versa

We thus find in the succession of chapters of Microcosmes the application of the toolbox of the theory of fields to different cases - religion, publishing, science, economy, haute couture, politics, literature , the law, without forgetting the State.

For Bourdieu, the latter could be defined as a "meta-field", covering all the others through its claim to the monopoly of symbolic capital, that is to say neither more nor less than the capacity to define reality, to notably through the multiplicity of acts of appointment, certification and classification that it carries out: academic titles, military ranks, awards recognizing individual “merit” or even the writing of school programs or even determination of the date or time2.

Each of these cases constituted an opportunity for the sociologist to put his theory back on the book and refine his analytical tools according to their confrontation with empirical reality, to correct or deepen this or that aspect.

When he examines, for example, haute couture or the mechanisms of political delegation, he intends to engage, beyond the empirical study of an area of ​​reality, in a theoretical reflection on fetishism in order to go beyond the Marxist of these "products of the human head which appear endowed with a life of their own". He thus insists on the properly “magical” effects that the belief of the participants of the same field arouses with respect to the dominant producers and their products.

The seventh and last chapter of Microcosmes is made up of the outline of the work that the sociologist had begun and modestly proposes “elements” for constructing a general theory of fields by endeavoring to synthesize these different studies. But, as the editors of the volume observe in their introduction, this project is anything but closed.

Thus this final work by Pierre Bourdieu – in reality the penultimate, since he also left a later manuscript on the painter Edouard Manet – is in fact the first of a collection bearing the same name – Microcosmes – from the same publisher.

This collection, intended to (re)publish certain texts by the sociologist, accompanied by an updated critical apparatus, but also and above all by new surveys by current researchers, making it possible to present "the most advanced state of research in the social sciences, so as to make it possible to update not only the “data” but the methods and more generally the analytical tools associated with the notion of field” (p. 13).

International recognition

The editorial vein of Pierre Bourdieu is therefore far from being dried up, to the delight of sociologists, both apprentices and confirmed. It must be said that the prose of the author of La distinction is not always the clearest. , which was assumed by the latter, preferring not to be understood than misunderstood.

However, the publication of his courses at the College de France, undertaken after his death, showed that it could be as clear as it was captivating.

Alongside his oral interventions gathered in Questions de sociologie (1984), one can thus learn about “speaking Bourdieu”, or more exactly read a “spoken” Bourdieu in Sur l'Etat (2012), Manet. A Symbolic Revolution (2013), General Sociology (in two volumes, 2015 and 2016), Economic Anthropology (2017) – where he takes seriously the model of homo oeconomicus, pushed to its climax by Gary Becker to better demonstrate its limits – and, finally, The interest in disinterestedness (2022), published in recent days and which closes the series.

Anyone who has ventured into these thick volumes has been able to feel the pleasure of accompanying this oral prose and this thought in the making, where the sociologist reports on the surveys he is carrying out with his collaborators, such as the one on the construction of the single-family house market which gave rise to Social Structures of the Economy (2000).

Pierre Bourdieu has enjoyed and continues to enjoy an international aura that is certainly unparalleled in the sociological discipline. Evidenced by the release in 2020 of an International Dictionary Bourdieu (CNRS Editions), but also the countless translations of his works and articles, with print runs that would make his colleagues pale, and the no less numerous studies devoted to him or which resume its theoretical and methodological toolbox.

A number of works have attempted to experiment with its tools and results on societies other than France or in more recent periods, to see to what extent certain proposals, such as these analyzes of the mechanisms of cultural distinction, retained their relevance today and in other latitudes3.

Finally, some of his most faithful traveling companions, such as Jean-Claude Passeron or Luc Boltanski, subsequently moved away from it to trace their own theoretical path. Other researchers, such as Bernard Lahire in France4 or Michael Burawoy in the United States5, are part of an approach that could be described as a critical tribute, recognizing all the fruitfulness of Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical scaffolding, without refrain from pointing out what they consider to be limits and blind spots.

A still disturbing sociologist

No one is a prophet in his country, it is well known, and nowhere else than in France, no doubt, has Pierre Bourdieu been the subject of receptions as severe as they are unfair.

His unveiling of the mechanisms of social reproduction or the struggles for classification within the academic world have thus earned him the accusation of being “determinist”, even of masking under the guise of science an approach that is above all political. This criticism has come both from journalists, “philosophers” and other self-authorized commentators, including certain sociologists marginalized in the space of the discipline but well in court in the media field6. The tenor of these accusations is at best misinterpretation, at worst bad faith.

It remains to be determined what in these attacks stems from the reaction of the vampire, terrified by the light shed on certain mechanisms of domination from which they took advantage, or from a principled opposition to his clearly left-wing political interventions, which have truly gained momentum. magnitude during the great social movement of November-December 1995 against the Juppé plan for (counter-)reform of social protection7.

Taking up the cause of the strikers then opposed to the government, Pierre Bourdieu will during the last years of his life commit himself publicly against the triumph of neoliberal ideology and found the collective "Reasons to act" as well as the house of edition of the same name in an attempt to counter this neoliberal fire8. The publisher pursues this objective even today through the publication of intervention works but also, now, more academic works.

Twenty years after his death, both intellectually and editorially, Pierre Bourdieu continues to capture the quick!