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Pierre
Bourdieu, Sociologist, anti-neo-liberalism militant. Born Denguin,
France, August 1, 1930. Died January 23, aged 71.
 IERRE
Bourdieu, France's leading intellectual and one of the world's most
important sociologists of the late 20th century, died from cancer
on January 23.
Bourdieu was born in a remote village in the south of France. He was
the first in his family to finish high school; he went on to
study philosophy at a leading French institution and occupy the chair
of sociology at the College de France, the most eminent position an
academic can aspire to in France.
He wrote more than 25 books. The most important academically are The
Inheritors, a study of the reproduction of inequality in the French
education system; Outline of a Theory of Practice, an
ethnographic analysis of Algeria in which he developed his key concepts
of habitus, symbolic violence and symbolic capital; Distinction,
a study of the relation between taste and class, voted as one of the
century's most important sociology books by the International Sociological
Association; and Pascalian Meditations, a kind of summation
of the philosophical ramifications of his work.
During the Algerian war, which shaped the thoughts of many French
intellectuals, Bourdieu, who was teaching in Algeria, became attracted
away from philosophy to anthropological and sociological research
of Algerian society and, later, French society. He felt that philosophers
were best at asking the most difficult questions one can ask about
life, but were less successful in providing rich answers because they
remained sealed in the domain of pure ideas.
Right from the beginning, this line of thought allowed Bourdieu to
develop a somewhat paradoxical approach to research that gave his
work its unmistakeable specificity. For him, any social science that
fell into being a simple empirical exercise in data accumulation,
without dealing with the important philosophical questions of the
time, was not worth its while. At the same time, he was particularly
down on the French art of theoretical-philosophical pontification.
He believed that theorising about society had to be accompanied by
a total commitment to a science of society with all the logical and
empirical rigour, and hard long hours of labour, the idea entailed.
This attitude was reflected in the way Bourdieu dealt with his research
students. In the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, the
postgraduates-only institution where he taught, students were actively
encouraged in the French intellectual tradition to see themselves
as "interesting and original thinkers" competing among each
other as to how interesting and original they could be.
Bourdieu encouraged an unusual kind of humility among his students.
He instilled it by insisting on the limited capacity of academic work
to change the world. He used to invite students who had inflated ideas
about the importance of their thoughts to keep a sense of proportion
by thinking empirically about how many people would get to know about
their great ideas even if they managed to publish them. He taught
his students to treat their work as work, even as a kind of proletarian
work, as opposed to a kind of luxurious quest for bright ideas or
truth.
Bourdieu's work was always political. During the revolts of May 1968,
it was common to see students on the barricade with The Inheritors
under their arms. His work on Algeria was intransigently anti-colonialist
and all of his French work aimed at uncovering the various hidden
processes of domination that exist in the social world. Yet in these
works he never deviated from the need for scientific rigour. He looked
down on academics motivated by political ideals, calling them, after
Weber, "proletaroid". He believed, as he often put it, that
"good sentiments do not produce good sociology".
However, in his later years Bourdieu became increasingly political.
He came to occupy the position of the classical engaged leftist intellectual
that Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault had occupied before him.
This began with the writing by him and other sociologists in his research
centre of The Weight of the World, a work that aimed at defining
the nature and extent of "social misery" in France. It was
a genuinely avant-garde work. It aimed not only at an original academic
understanding of misery but at giving a voice to it through the transcription
of full interviews with people whose voices would never otherwise
be heard.
Paradoxically, it became a bestseller and gave Bourdieu a public media
presence he never had before. But it also led him to analyse the foundations
of social misery in the present and he became increasingly public
in his opposition to neo-liberal policy, writing against it in an
almost pamphleteering style. He even created his own publishing house,
Raisons d'Agir (reasons to act), to encourage the publication of semi-academic
political critiques of neo-liberalism as well as the media.
Last year a feature movie on Bourdieu titled Sociology is a Combat
Sport played to full houses in Paris. However, this populism was
also accompanied by the writing of a thoroughly academic analysis
of the economics of the real estate market and the politics of housing,
The Social Structures of the Economy. He had just finished
a book bringing together his anthropological work in his home village.
It will appear posthumously.
For Australians, especially in today's climate, where the political
elite seems intent on developing the art of intellectual-bashing into
a full-time national sport, it is hard to understand the social impact
created by Bourdieu's death in France and elsewhere. France's President
Jacques Chirac paid him tribute by describing him as one of the most
recognised French intellectuals in the world, "someone who under
the influence of Durkheim and Weber has profoundly marked the sociology
of his time with new operational concepts".
Chirac also said in his long tribute that Bourdieu's work had helped
politicians understand that "the time of culture cannot be subjected
to the time of the economy". I'd be happy to hear an Australian
politician mention Weber, let alone say something like this.
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