|
|
 ritic
of the 'symbolic violence' of social structures who became one of
France's most prominent political activists
His international fame might not quite have equalled that of his friend
Jacques Derrida, but in France the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was
probably the most convincing embodiment of the politically active
intellectual since Jean-Paul Sartre or Michel Foucault. He combined
eminence in his field with a readiness to speak out and become involved
in the life of the country. But then, with characteristic rigour,
he disdained the term “intellectual” in favour of “committed sociologist”.
In recent years, particularly, Bourdieu’s name was linked to the anti-globalisation
movement, whether he was defending the charismatic farmer José
Bové (who rose to fame by trashing a McDonald’s outlet), encouraging
striking French railways workers in 1995, campaigning on behalf of
immigrants unable to regularise their status (the so-called “sans
papiers”), or accusing business leaders of cultural vandalism.
More than anyone else, Bourdieu spoke for what he ironically called
“the Left of the Left” — in other words, for those whose
views were not adequately represented by France’s ruling (or at least
power-friendly) Socialist party, or by any form of conventional political
organisation.
As an intellectual conscience, his authority was all the greater because,
unlike so many others, he refused to play the television pundit, with
all the risks of glibness that this involved. Bourdieu’s intellectual
enterprise was about understanding “the system”, and how its structures
make us what we are. And those structures naturally include the media.
His political commitment was to defending the victims — and
defence meant action.
The son of a post office employee, Pierre Bourdieu was born in Denguin,
near Pau, where he went to school. In 1948, like so many outstanding
pupils, he completed his schooling at one of the great Parisian lycées,
Louis Legrand, before proceeding to study philosophy with Louis Althusser
at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (1951-54).
He rose swiftly into the ranks of the French intellectual elite. After
teaching briefly at a school in Moulins, and serving as an assistant
in the faculties a Algiers (1958-60) and Paris (1960-61), he was made
a lecturer at Lille University before taking up positions at two of
the capital’s leading intellectual institutions, the Ecole des Hautes
Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the Ecole Normale Supérieure,
in 1964.
His intellectual position was consolidated by his editorship of the
Sens Commun collection at Editions de Minuit (which published
some of his own major books), and, in 1975, of the influential journal
Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, where many of his
important articles first appeared. In 1982, proposed by Michel Foucault,
he was elected to the chair of sociology at the most prestigious French
intellectual institution of all, the Collège de France.
Internationally too, Bourdieu’s work was quick to gain recognition.
He was a visiting member of the institute of advanced studies at Princeton
(1972-73), a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and
a member of the Max Planck Institute (1974- 76). He also founded and
directed the Centre de Sociologie Européenne and was editor
of Liber, an international review that he and others launched
when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
Bourdieu’s first three major books (plus two subsequent volumes) all
came out of his experience in Algeria, where (like Derrida) he served
during the years of the country’s war of independence from France.
These studies stood out for their methodological rigour and careful
combination of statistics and observation in the field. His Sociologie
de l’Algérie (1958) was where he began to develop both
his striving for objectivity and his sympathy for the oppressed: when
considering the Algerians, Bourdieu realised, one necessarily had
to be aware of the way one looked, of how one’s own position was determined.
Although too marginal and obscure a figure to play a prominent role
in the anti-colonial movement of the day, Bourdieu was highly critical
of French treatment of the Algerians. More importantly, perhaps, he
began to understand how the domination of one people by another was
a matter of what he called “symbolic violence” as well as physical
oppression. This was to be a key notion throughout his work. Bourdieu
was to analyse the way in which social and cultural structures — what
he later called “fields” (champs) — secrete their
own representations and values, and how these function both to identify
insiders and to exclude outsiders. The first step towards improving
society was to understand how it worked. Consequently, his analysis
ranged across numerous social spheres. Back in France, he collaborated
with Claude Passeron on Les Héritiers (1964), a small
and remarkably successful book about the way in which differences
in “cultural inheritance” favours the perpetuation of social inequality
through, and often because of, the school system. They developed this
theme in La Reproduction (1970). Bourdieu had set about a gradual
and systematic definition of all the social contexts that determine
how we act, and ulti- mately, the degree to which we can act upon
or change circumstances.
On the theme of class difference, Bourdieu’s magnum opus was La
Distinction (1979), a study of the workings and significance of
taste, and the way it is shaped by our habitus — another
key concept of his, meaning mental and social conditioning. This “social
critique of judgment” was voted one of the 20th century’s ten most
significant works of sociology by the International Sociological Association.
Among his later works were an analysis of academic life itself in
Homo Academicus (1984); a study of the French Grandes
Ecoles system (La noblesse d’Etat, 1989) — prescient
in a country where it has now become fashionable to decry the effects
of the dominance and esprit de corps of such institutions — and
a study of the emergence of “the modern literary field” in Les
règles de l’art.
If Bourdieu’s national and international eminence as a sociologist
was secured in the 1970s and 1980s, his public fame as a campaigning
intellectual is more recent. In France, it took a large stride with
La misère du monde (1993), a thick volume about social
suffering. Published in what were depressed times in France, this
became a surprise bestseller (with more than 120,000 copies sold in
France alone).
As Bourdieu became an increasingly prominent figure in the developing
movement against mainstream politics and freemarket orthodoxy, so
his books attracted increasing controversy. His Sur la télévision
was dismissed by some critics as jaundiced and old hat — among
other things it upbraided fellow intellectuals for gratuitous “fast
food” opining on subjects they knew nothing about — but
it too sold well (some 150,000 copies). This kind of popular success
was surprising given Bourdieu’s preference for stolid rigour over
any kind of seductive prose.
La domination masculine (1998), concerning male domination,
also met with a mixed response, even from feminists. Indeed, in the
same year one former disciple published a book about “Pierre Bourdieu’s
sociological terrorism”. Such criticism was itself a reflection of
his apparent domination of his subject and — always irritating
for less glamorous colleagues — his immense public stature.
His ideas have passed into common intellectual parlance, much as Lacan’s
and Foucault’s did a decade or two earlier.
Pierre Bourdieu is survived by his wife, Marie-Claire, and three children.
Pierre Bourdieu, French sociologist, was born on August 1, 1930. He
died on January 23, 2002, aged 71.
|
|
