Pierre Bourdieu, the Centrality of the Social, and the Possibility of Politics
Craig Calhoun From the paper: Bourdieu's public interventions were...firmly rooted in his sociological analyses. Indeed, it was his theory of social fields-honed in studies of the religious field, the legal field, and the field of cultural production--that informed his defense of the autonomy (always only relative) of the scientific field from market pressure. His theory of the multiple forms of capital-cultural and social as well as economic-suggested that these were indirectly convertible but if they were reduced to simple equivalence cultural and social capital lost their specificity and efficacy. And, his early studies in Algeria showed the corrosive impact of unbridled extension of market forces. Bourdieu knew the political importance of science, but also that this importance would be vitiated by reducing science to politics. In Pantagruel, Rabelais famously said, "Science without conscience is nothing but the ruin of the soul." It is a better line in French, where 'conscience' also means consciousness. It is not the sort of line Bourdieu would quote, though, because public appeals to conscience are too commonly justifications for a jargon of authenticity rather than the application of reason. But Bourdieu demonstrated that conscience-in both its senses--is not simply an interior state of individuals. It is a social achievement. As such, it is always at risk. Bourdieu was a scholar and researcher of great rigor and also a man and a citizen with a conscience attuned to inequality and domination. Would there were more. |