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a thinker, he was as important to the second half of the 20th century
as Sartre had been to the generation before.
Pierre Bourdieu, who has died from cancer at 71, was, for many, the
leading intellectual of present-day France. The author of more than
25 influential books including his crucial study of Algeria, Sociologie
de L'Algerie (published in America as The Algerians, 1962), Bourdieu
launched a new European review, Liber, in 1989 to coincide with the
fall of the Berlin Wall and the begining of a new era. Most importantly,
Bourdieu considered that those lucky enough to have spent their lives,
as he had, in studying the social world, could not be neutral or indifferent
to struggle.
When French railway workers went on strike in 1995, he supported their
protests against the Juppé government's reform of the social
security system which, he claimed, sought only to give the government
authority in the world financial markets. He was sharply critical
of Juppé's successor, Lionel Jospin, and his coalition of false
socialism, attacking "le neo-liberal troika" of Blair-Jospin-Schröder.
He also defended those immigrants, les sans papiers, who were present
in France but who could not legally justify their presence. He attacked
globalisation.
It became common practice for officials of the French Socialist party
to talk of la gauche bourdieusienne, their enemies on the left. The
communists attacked this left which was not so much non-political
as anti-political and they viciously criticised the romantic self-comfort
that they claimed its leaders enjoyed. In 1981 Bourdieu had supported
the comedian Coluche in his attempt to be a candidate in the presidential
elections because he was the champion of "all those who don't count
as politicians".
Bourdieu was born in the south of France and educated at the lycée
in Pau, before moving to the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris,
from where he gained entrance to the Ecole Normale Supérieure.
There he studied philosophy with Louis Althusser and, after being
received at the agrégation, he became a lycée teacher
at Moulins from 1955 to 1958.
In many respects this was a normal career trajectory. But in 1958
he took up a post as lecturer in the faculty of Algiers. To go there
at a time when the future of Algeria and France's involvement there
was dangerously uncertain, was courageous. But it showed the sort
of man Bourdieu was. Algeria was, without doubt, the outstanding problem
faced by France at the time.
For Bourdieu, the clash between the Algerian peoples and French colonialism
could only be understood by constructing the original economic and
social structures of the indigenous civilisations, and he chose the
Kabyle peoples, the Berbers. The result was his first book, The Algerians.
Published in France as a cheap edition, it immediately established
his importance.
In 1960 he returned to Paris and taught at the University of Paris
until 1964, when he took up a post at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales, where he worked with Raymond Aron, and where
he created the Centre for the Sociology of Education and Culture.
In 1981 he was appointed to the chair of Sociology at the Collège
de France.
From 1975 he directed the publication Actes de la Recherche en Sciences
Sociales in which many of his articles appeared. Once he had set up
Liber, he offered writers and scholars the opportunity of writing
about intellectual problems that were of general concern - he published
a short poem by Harold Pinter on the Gulf war.
His sociological work covered a wide range of subjects, starting with
an examination of the peasantry in the Béarn, where he had
been brought up and studied farming, with particular reference to
the number of peasants who did not marry. This study was historical
as well as economic and sociological. In it he warned all sociologists:
"Observation of reality puts us on our guard against the temptation
to construct over-simple models."
Bourdieu was preoccupied with detail but also an attempt to produce
a wide and more general system of ideas. Although he is always seen
as a supporter of the student revolutionaries of 1968, he was, in
fact, highly critical of their ideas. His belief that teachers could
be, in spite of themselves, essentially traditionalist and that students
had, unwittingly, become the bearers of a culture with which they
were satisfied, was not popular.
In October 1999 he spoke to some 70 leading patrons of the audio-visual
arts in Paris. "Masters of the world, do you know what you are doing?"
was his question. His answer was that, since they obeyed the law of
maximum profits in the shortest possible time, they were killing culture.
He is survived by his wife, Marie-Claire, and his three sons.
Stuart
Jeffries writes:
Last year a documentary film about Pierre Bourdieu - Sociology
is a Combat Sport - became an unexpected hit in Paris. Its very
title stressed how much of a politically engaged intellectual Bourdieu
was, taking on the mantle of Emile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre in French
public life, and slugging it out with politicians because he thought
that was what people like him should do.
Bourdieu became "the intellectual reference" for movements opposed
to neo-liberalism and globalisation that developed in France and elsewhere
during the 90s. "Ours is a Darwinian world of insecurity and stress,"
he wrote, "where the permanent threat of unemployment creates a permanent
state of precariousness."
In his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, named
as one of the 20th century's 10 most important works of sociology
by the International Sociological Association, he applied the notion
of habitus to taste and attempted to undermine Kantian aesthetics
which claimed that our notion of what is beautiful is not determined
by social influences. By contrast, Bourdieu argued that preferences
for luxury cars, designer clothing, expensive goods and works of art
are shaped by people's habitus.
His On Television attacked presenters for delivering what he called
"cultural fast food". He accused many fellow intellectuals of abusing
their privileged status in France by commenting on issues about which
they knew little, and his 1999 book, Acts of Resistance: Against the
Tyranny of the Market, stressed the duty of the intellectual in fighting
against creeping globalisation.
Among those he actively supported was José Bové, the
French small-farmers' leader, who, in 1999, gained fame overnight
by leading an attack on a McDonald's outlet, regarded as a symbol
of globalisation. "For him," Bové said about Bourdieu, "life
itself was a commitment."
Bourdieu's death deprives France of one of its great post-war intellectuals,
a thinker in the same rank as Foucault, Barthes and Lacan.
Pierre
Bourdieu, sociologist and philosopher, born August 1 1930; died January
23 2002.
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