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 f the manifold works by Pierre
Bourdieu, The State Nobility is perhaps the most formidable and the most
paradoxical, and no doubt for these very reasons likely to disconcert, if not confound,
many of its foreign readers. First, it is at once doggedly Francocentric in empirical
substance and scope, yet irrepressibly universalizing in analytical intent and reach.
Second, and this is one of the hallmarks of Bourdieu's sociological style, The State
Nobility is resolutely empirical, data-laden to the point of saturation, yet animated
by a forceful theoretical project that places it at the epicenter of debates over power,
culture, and reason at century's end.
 Even more so than Distinction,
which it builds upon and extends in a number of directions, (1) this study of the logic of social domination in advanced
society, and of the mechanisms whereby it disguises and perpetuates itself, is anchored
deep in the specificities of the French system of class, culture, and education in the two
decades following the upheaval of May 68. At the same time, as in every good ethnological
report according to Marcel Mauss, « what may appear as futile detail is in fact a
condensation of principles » (2)
that Bourdieu contends are equally operative in other countries and epochs.
I
The first such principle is
the vexing yet obdurate relationship of collision and collusion, autonomy and complicity,
distance and dependence, between material and symbolic power. As Weber noted
well, in every structure of domination, those « privileged through existing
political, social, and economic orders » are never content to wield their power
unvarnished and to impose their prerogatives naked. Rather, they « wish to see their
positions transformed from purely factual power relations into a cosmos of acquired
rights, and to know that they are thus sanctified. » (3) In feudal society, the Church was the institution entrusted
with transmuting the lord's might, founded as it was upon control of weaponry, land, and
riches, into divine right; ecclesiastical authority was deployed to justify and
thereby solidify the rule of the new warrior class. In the complex societies spawned by
late capitalism, Bourdieu maintains, the school has taken over this work of sanctification
of social divisions. So that not one but two species of capital now give access
to positions of power, define the structure of social space, and govern the life chances
and trajectories of groups and individuals : economic capital and cultural
capital.
Credentials help define the
contemporary social order, in the medieval sense of ordo, a set of gradations at
once temporal and spiritual, mundane and celestial, which establish incommensurable
degrees of worth among women and men, not only by sorting and allocating them across the
different slots that make up the social structure, but also, and more importantly, by
presenting the resulting inequalities between them as ineluctable necessities born of the
talent, effort, and desire of individuals. This is because cultural capital, though mainly
accumulated and handed down in the family, appears to inhere in the person of its bearers.
The fact that it « manages to combine the prestige of innate property with the
merits of acquisition » (4)
makes it uniquely suited to legitimizing the continued inheritance of social privileges in
societies smitten with the democratic ideal.
Here Bourdieu's object is the operation
of social alchemy whereby a social hierarchy dissimulates itself, to those it
dignifies no less than to those it excludes, as a scale of human excellence, how an
historically arbitrary social order rooted in the materiality of economic and political
power transmutes itself into what displays every outward appearance of an aristocracy of
intelligence. Under this angle, the granting of an elite degree is not so much a
« rite of passage » à la Van Gennep as a rite of institution (5) : it does not
demarcate a before and an after so much as it differentiates —and
elevates— those destined to occupy eminent social positions from those over whom
they will lord. It evokes reverence for and consecrates them, in the strongest sense of
the term, that is, it makes them sacred (anyone who has attended a commencement ceremony
at a major British or American university cannot but be struck by their archaic religious
feel that would have delighted Robertson Smith). As the etymology of the word
«credentials,» credentialis, giving authority (derived in turn from credere,
to believe), testifies, the bestowal of a diploma is the climactic moment in a long cycle
of production of collective faith in the legitimacy of a new form of class rule.
II
Indeed, much as the
« generalization of the ceremony of dubbing » was, according to Marc Bloch,
« the symptom of a profound transformation of the notion of knighthood » in
the Middle ages, (6) Bourdieu
argues that the generalization of educational titles as prerequisite for ascent to the
apex of private corporations and public bureaucracies signals the consolidation of a new
mode of domination and a corresponding transformation in the system of strategies
whereby the ruling class maintains and masks itself, at the cost of swift and continual
self-metamorphosis.
In feudal society, the relation
between the temporal and spiritual poles of power took the form of a relatively simple,
dualistic yet complementary, opposition between warriors and priests, military and
hierocratic authority, wielders of swords and wielders of words. With the constitution of
the formally rational state and the concurrent ascendancy of the «second capital» (the
two, Bourdieu hypothesizes, are correlative historical inventions), this antagonistic
couple is replaced by an immensely complex web of criss-crossing linkages among the
multiplicity of fields in which the various forms of social power now effective
circulate and concentrate. The chain of interdependencies that sews them together into
this peculiar ensemble Bourdieu calls field of power (a notion introduced in the
early 1970s but elaborated for the first time here both theoretically and empirically)
extends from the economic field, at one end, to the field of cultural production, at the
other. (7) Industrialist and
artist in the nineteenth century, manager and intellectual in the twentieth, are, in the
case of France, the personifications of the dominant and the dominated poles of the field
of power respectively. Between them, and in symmetric and inverse order according to the
relative preponderancy they accord to economic or cultural capital, are arrayed the fields
of politics, higher civil service, the professions, and the university.
As species of capital diversify
and autonomous fields multiply —two propositions which, for Bourdieu, are
equivalent conceptual translations of the same epochal trend since capital and field
mutually define and specify each other— and as the more transparent «mechanical
solidarity» between weakly differentiated and interchangeable powers gives way to the
more intricate «organic solidarity» between highly distinct and disparate powers,
tensions mount and clashes threaten to break out. For the fact that variegated forms of
capital now enter into the formula of domination implies that different principles of
social primacy and legitimacy must be reckoned with and reconciled. The field of power is
precisely this arena where holders of the various kinds of capital compete over which of
them will prevail. At stake in these struggles amongst the dominant (oft mistaken for
confrontations between ruling and subordinate classes) is the relative value and potency
of rival kinds of capital, as set in particular by the going «exchange rate» between
economic and cultural currencies.
This is where the system
of elite establishments of higher education enters the picture. In societies characterized
by the copresence and contest of diverse forms of power that all rely increasingly upon
conversion into credentials as a means for self-perpetuation, this system not only
guarantees preferential and speedy access to positions of command to the sons of those
lineages who already monopolize them (full membership in the nobility, whether based on
blood or diplomas, is essentially a male affair). Its high degree of autonomy and internal
differentiation according to the same antinomy between money and culture that organizes
the field of power at large enables it also to defuse intranecine conflicts by recognizing
and rewarding diverse claims to scholastic, and thence social, excellence.
«Intellectual schools» such as
École normale supérieure, the seedbed of France's high intelligentsia (Bourdieu
is one in a long string of distinguished alumni), draw and honor mainly those students who
are most strongly attracted to them in the first place because their dispositions are
living embodiments of the kind of capital these schools demand and valorize, viz. children
originating from the cultured fractions of the bourgeoisie to which they promptly return.
Establishments geared to grooming captains of industry and state, such as École des
hautes études commerciales and École polytechnique, on the other hand, are
primarily the preserve of students issued from, and destined for, the economically rich
fractions of the French haute bourgeoisie. Situated at midpoint between the two poles of
the space of French elite schools, the École nationale d'administration, from
which cabinet members and high civil servants hail, mingles the two kinds of competencies,
cultural and economic, and recruits students whose family patrimony typically cumulates
rare credentials and old wealth.
By providing separate pathways
of transmission of privilege and by recognizing competing, even antagonistic, claims to
preeminence within its own order, the field of elite schools insulates and placates the
various categories of inheritors of power and ensures, better than any other device, the pax
dominorum indispensable to the sharing of the spoils of hegemony. Hence it is not
this or that establishment but the field (i.e., the space of objective relations) they
compose that contributes qua field to the reproduction of the evolving matrix of
patterned differences and distances constitutive of the social order. The immediate,
concrete, object of The State Nobility is the structure and functioning of the
uppermost tier of France's system of higher education and its linkages to this country's
bourgeoisie and top corporations. Its deeper, theoretic, aim is to elaborate, in the very
movement whereby it displays empirically one of its historical instantiations, a model of
the social division of the labor of domination that obtains in advanced societies
where a diversity of forms of power coexist and vie for supremacy.
III
Its extreme centralization
and high social selectivity, rooted in long-standing ties between class cleavages, state
building, republicanism, and education and in the bifurcation between university and grandes
écoles, the eagerness with which it sanctifies worldly (i.e., bourgeois) cultural
baggage and the corresponding brutality with which it devalues its own products as «scolaires,»
all make France's system of higher learning a propitious terrain upon which to expose the
surreptitious correlation of academic with social classification and the Janus-faced nexus
of connivence-through-conflict between the two poles of the field of power. The
specificity of these empirical materials, however, should not detract from the wider
applicability of the analytic framework employed to process them. Properly construed, The
State Nobility offers a systematic research program on any national field of power,
provided that the American (British, Japanese, Brazilian, etc.) reader carries out the work
of transposition necessary to generate, by way of homological reasoning, an organized
set of hypotheses for comparative inquiry in her own country. (8)
Bourdieu holds that the
chiasmatic organization of the contemporary ruling class, expressive of a historical state
of the division of labor between material (economic) and symbolic (cultural) capital, (9) and its projection onto the
field of elite schools that both disengages and entwines the two, is characteristic of all
advanced societies. But this subterranean structure of opposition takes on phenomenally
diverse forms in different countries, depending on a number of intersecting factors,
including the historical trajectory of (upper) class formation, state structures, and the
shape of the system of education in the society and time under consideration. Similarly,
Bourdieu proposes that the rise of the «new capital» translates everywhere into a shift
in modes of reproduction, from direct reproduction, where power is transmitted
essentially within the family via economic property, to school-mediated
reproduction, where the bequeathal of privilege is simultaneously effectuated and
transfigured by the intercession of educational institutions. But, again, all ruling
classes resort to both modes conjointly (Bourdieu takes pain to stress that the growing relative
weight of cultural capital in no way effaces the ability of economic capital to propagate
itself autonomically) and their partial preference for one or the other will depend on the
full system of instruments of reproduction at their disposal and on the current balance of
power between the various fractions tied to this or that mode of transmittance.
It follows that it would be a
mistake —Alfred North Whitehead called it the « fallacy of misplaced
concreteness »— (10)
to look for one-to-one correspondences across national boundaries between the institutions
entrusted with perpetuating the network of power positions in different societies (e.g.,
to seek an exact American or British counterpart to the École nationale
d'administration, for which there is none). Rather, one must, applying the relational
mode of thinking encapsulated by the notion of field, set out in each particular case to
uncover empirically the specific configurations assumed by the complexus
of oppositions that structure social space, the system of education, and the field of
power, as well as their interconnexions.
To illustrate summarily, the
structure of the space of elite education turns, in the French instance, on a sharp
horizontal dualism between grandes écoles (select graduate schools based on a
numerus clausus, special preparatory classes, and national competitive entrance
examinations, with direct pathways to high-profile jobs) and university (mass institutions
open to all those who complete their secondary cursus and only loosely connected to the
occupational world) and, within the field of grandes écoles itself, between,
along one axis, major and minor schools and, along the other, establishments oriented
toward intellectual values and establishments grooming for economic-political positions.
In the decentralized American system of education, these dualities are refracted into a
whole series of nested oppositions, vertical as well as horizontal : between
private and public sectors (starting at the level of secondary schooling), between
community colleges and four-year universities, and between the great mass of tertiary
educational institutions and a handful of elite establishments (anchored by the Ivy
League) that arrogate the lion's share of command posts in private and public affairs
alike. (11) Due to the
deep-rooted historic preponderancy of economic over cultural capital, the opposition
between the two poles of power, and between the corresponding fractions of the American
dominant class, does not materialize itself in the form of rival tracks or schools. It is
projected instead within each (elite) university in the adversative and
tensionful relations between the graduate division of arts and sciences, on the one side,
and professional schools (especially law, medicine, and business) on the other, as well as
in the antipodean relations these entertain with the powers-that-be and in the contrasted
images of knowledge they appeal to (research versus service, critique versus expertise,
creativity versus utility, etc.).
Yet, for all the differences in
their respective systemic location and circuitry, the tightly integrated network of Ivy
League universities and private boarding schools functions as a close, if partial,
analogue to the French device of grandes écoles and their associated classes
préparatoires. Since the « mere assertion that elite schools exist, especially
socially elite schools, goes against the American grain, » (12) it is perhaps not superfluous to recall
briefly just how exclusive —and exclusionary— the latter are. Suffice
it to note that virtually all graduates of the top U.S. boarding schools (who comprise 1%
of American high-school enrollment) enter college, compared to 76% of students from
Catholic and other private schools, and 45% of all public school seniors. These
super-privileged students, nine in ten of whom are children of professionals and business
managers (two thirds of their fathers and one third of their mothers attended graduate or
professional school) are also much more likely to land on the most prized campuses, even
controling for scholastic aptitude scores : in 1982, nearly half of graduating
«preppies» applied to Ivy League schools and 42% of those applicants were admitted, as
against 26% of all candidates nationwide (though the latter are drawn from the country's
top 4% students), thanks to close organizational ties and active recruiting funnels
between boarding schools and high-status private colleges. (13)
In 1984, a mere thirteen elite
boarding schools were found to have educated 10% of the board members of large U.S.
companies and nearly one fifth of directors of two major firms, as compounding exclusive
college degrees with upper class pedigree multiplies the probability of joining the
«inner circle» of corporate power. Amongst senior managers, possession of prestigious
educational credentials interacts with high-class origins to decide who will become chief
executive, serve on the boards of outside firms, and enter the leadership of major
business associations. And just as in France diplomas sanctioning « generalized
bureaucratic culture » tend to supersede certificates of technical proficiency, in
the United States a top law degree or a bachelor's degree from a select private college
gives a manager a greater chance of reaching the vertex of responsibiliy in the corporate
world than a master's degree from a high-ranking MBA program. (14)
Graduates of elite boarding
schools and universities coming from well-to-do families listed in the Social Register
are also massively overrepresented in the upper reaches of the American state (including
the cabinet, the judiciary, and government advisory boards), political personnel,
high-priced law firms, the national media, philanthropic organizations, and the arts. (15) And those who emerge out of
the prep crucible to become «powerbrokers» in Boston, Washington, and L.A. feel no less
entitled to their positions and prerogatives than their counterparts from the rue
Saint-Guillaume in Paris.
IV
Distinguishing the
(specific) empirical findings from the (general) theoretical model contained in The
State Nobility suggests an agenda for a comparative, genetic and structural
sociology of national fields of power that would, for each society, catalogue
efficient forms of capital, specify the social and historical determinants of their
degrees of differentiation, distance, and antagonism, and evaluate the part played by the
system of elite schools (or functionally equivalent institutions) in regulating the
relations they entertain.
Such an inquiry would no doubt
confirm that the greater opacity of the school-mediated mode of reproduction, and thus its
improved capacity to dissimulate the perpetuation of power, comes at a real price. First,
it becomes more and more costly to be an inheritor : elite schools everywhere
typically subject their students to stringent work regimens, austere lifestyles, and
practices of intellectual and social mortification that entail significant personal
sacrifice. Second, the stochastic logic which now governs the transmission of privilege is
such that, while he enjoys every possible advantage from the start, not every son of chief
executive, surgeon, or scientist is assured of attaining a comparably eminent social
position at the finish of the race. (16)
The specific contradiction of the school-mediated mode of reproduction resides
precisely in the disjunction it creates between the collective interest of the class that
the field of elite schools safeguards and the interest of those of its individual members
it must inevitably forfeit to do so.
Bourdieu submits that the
(limited) downward mobility of a contingent of upper-class youths and the transversal,
«deviant trajectories» that take a number of them from one pole of the field of power to
the other —as when offspring from the cultured fractions of the bourgeoisie
accede to posts of corporate or political responsibility— are powerful sources
of change within the field of power as well as major tributaries to the « new social
movements » that have flourished in the age of universal academic competition. At
any rate, not all heirs are, under this regime, both capable and desirous of shouldering
the burdens of succession.
This means that, to realize
itself fully, a generative sociology of the manifold logics of power cannot limit itself
to drawing an objectivist topology of distributions of capital. It must encompass within
itself this «special psychology» that Durkheim called for but never delivered. (17) It must, that is, give a
full account of the social genesis and implementation of the categories of thought and
action through which the participants in the various social worlds under investigation
come to perceive and actualize (or not) the potentialities they harbor. For Bourdieu, such
dissection of the practical cognition of individuals is indispensable because social
strategies are never determined unilaterally by the objective constraints of the structure
any more than they are by the subjective intentions of the agent. Rather, practice is
engendered in the mutual solicitation of position and disposition, in the
now-harmonious, now-discordant, encounter between « social structures and mental
structures,» history «objectified» as fields and history «embodied» in the form of
this socially patterned matrix of preferences and propensities that constitute habitus. (18)
This is why The State
Nobility opens with an analysis of the practical taxonomies and activities through
which teachers and students jointly produce the everyday reality of French elite schools
as a meaningful Lebenswelt. In part I (« Misrecognition and Symbolic
Violence »), Bourdieu takes us inside the mind of the philosophy professor of the École
normale supérieure so that we may learn how to think, feel, and judge like one and
hence grasp from within, as it were, the obviousness of the umbilical —yet
continually denied— relation between academic excellence and class distinction.
And in part II («Ordination»), he reconstructs with painstaking precision and pathos the
quasi-magical operations of segregation and aggregation whereby the scholastic nobility is
unified in body cum soul and infused with the utmost certitude of the justness of its
social mission. The thorough (re)making of the self involved in the fabrication of the
habitus of the dominant reveals how power insinuates itself by shaping minds and moulding
desire from within, no less than through the «dull compulsion» of material conditions
from without.
Far from resolving itself in the
mechanical interplay of homological structures (and of second-order correspondences
between homologies operating at different levels of the field of power and its constituent
subfields), Bourdieu is able to show that domination arises in and through that particular
relation of im-mediate and infraconscious «fit» between structure and agent that
obtains whenever individuals construct the social world through principles of vision
that, having emerged from that world, are patterned after its objective divisions.
Thus he can affirm at one and the same time, and without contradiction, that social agents
are fully determined and fully determinative (thereby dissolving the scholastic
alternative between structure and agency).
Paraphrasing Marx's famous
formula, one might say that, for Bourdieu, men and women make their own history but they
do not make it through categories of their own choosing. And we may also say without
succumbing to idealism that social order is, at bottom, a gnoseological order,
provided that we concurrently recognize that the cognitive schemata through which we know,
interpret, and actively assemble our world are themselves social constructs that
transcribe within individual bodies the constraints and facilitations of their originative
milieu.
V
One might be puzzled by the
fact that official state structures, policies, and personnel —the stock-in-trade
of conventional sociologies of the state— hardly turn up in the present book.
This deliberate absence is meant to dramatize one of Bourdieu's key
arguments : that the state is not necessarily where we look for it (i.e., where
it silently instructs us to cast our gaze and net), or, more accurately, that its efficacy
and effects may be strongest precisely where and when we neither expect nor suspect them. (19)
For Bourdieu, the differentia of
the state as an organization born of and geared toward the concentration of power(s) does
not lie where materialist theories from Max Weber to Norbert Elias to Charles Tilly
typically place it. We remain overly wedded to the (eighteenth-century) view of the state
as « revenue collector and recruiting sergeant » when we see in it that agency
which successfully monopolizes legitimate physical violence and neglect to notice
alongside that it also, and more decisively, monopolizes legitimate symbolic
violence. (20) The state,
Pierre Bourdieu intimates, is first and foremost the « central bank of symbolic
credit » which endorses all acts of nomination whereby social divisions and
dignities are assigned and proclaimed, i.e., promulgated as universally valid within the
purview of a given territory and population. And the academic title is the paradigmatic
manifestation of this «state magic» whereby social identities and destinies are
manufactured under cover of being recorded, social and technical competency fused, and
exhorbitant privileges transmuted into rightful dues.
The violence of the state, then,
is not exercised solely (or even mainly) upon the subaltern, the mad, the sick, and the
criminal. It bears upon us all, in a myriad minute and invisible ways, every time
we perceive and construct the social world through categories instilled in us via our
education. The state is not only «out there,» in the form of bureaucracies, authorities,
and ceremonies. It is also «in here,» ineffaceably engraved within us, lodged in the
intimacy of our being in the shared manners in which we feel, think, and judge. Not the
army, the asylum, the hospital, and the jail, but the school is the state's most potent
conduit and servant.
Durkheim was in the right when,
as the good Kantian that he was, he described the state as a «social brain» whose
« essential function is to think,» a « special organ entrusted with
elaborating definite representations valid for the collectivity. » (21) Only these representations, Bourdieu
insists, are those of a class-divided society, not a unified and harmonious social
organism, and their acceptance the product of stealthy imposition, not spontaneous
consentaneity. Unlike totemic myths, the « scholastic forms of
classification » that provide the basis for the logical integration of advanced
nation-states are class ideologies that serve particular interests in the very movement
whereby they portray them as universal. The instruments of knowledge and construction of
social reality diffused and inculcated by the school are also, and inescapably,
instruments of symbolic domination. And thus it is that the credential-based nobility owes
the fidelity we grant it, in the twofold sense of submission and belief, to the fact that
the « frameworks of interpretations » that the state forges and forces upon us
through the school are, to borrow another expression of Kenneth Burke's, so many
«acceptance frames» (22)
that make us gently bow under a yoke we do not even feel.
VI
In offering, first, an
anatomy of the production of the new capital and, second, an analysis of the social
effects of its circulation in the various fields that partake in the travail of
domination, The State Nobility reveals Bourdieu's sociology «of education» for
what it truly is, and has been from its inception : a generative anthropology of
powers focused on the special contribution that symbolic forms bring to their
operation, conversion, and naturalization. Much as the founding triumvirate of classical
sociology was preoccupied with religion as the opium, moral glue, and theodicy of nascent
capitalist modernity, Bourdieu's abiding interest in the school stems from the role he
assigns it as guarantor of the contemporary social order via the state magic that
consecrates social divisions by inscribing them simultaneously in the objectivity of
material distributions and in the subjectivity of cognitive classifications.
Weber's warning that
« patents of education will create a privileged «caste» » has proved
prescient : the technocrats who head today's capitalist firms and government
offices have at their disposal a panoply of powers and titles —of property,
education, and ancestry— without historical precedent. They need not choose
between birth and merit, ascription and achievement, inheritance and effort, the aura of
tradition and the efficiency the modernity, because they can embrace them all. And yet,
Bourdieu's sober diagnosis of the advent of the state nobility does not condemn us to
cynicism and passivity, nor to the fake radicalism of the rhetoric of the « politics
of culture. » For the relative autonomy that symbolic power must of necessity enjoy
to fullfill its legitimizing function always entails the possibility of its diversion in
the service of aims other than reproduction. This is especially true when the
« chain of legitimation » grows ever more extended and intrincate, and when
domination is wielded in the name of reason, universality, and the common weal.
Reason, Bourdieu argues in
pushing historicist rationalism to its limit, is neither a Nietzschian illusionist's trick
fueled by the « will to power,» nor an anthropological invariant rooted in the
immanent structure of human communication as with Habermas, but a potent if frail historical
invention born of the multiplication of those social microcosms, such as the fields
of science, art, law, and politics, in which universal values may be realized, albeit
imperfectly. (23) That an ever
greater number of protagonists in the game of domination find it necessary to concoct
rational justifications for their actions increases the chance that they will,
paradoxically, foster in spite of themselves the forward march of reason.
To play with universality is to
play with fire. And the collective role of intellectuals as bearers of the
« corporatism of the universal » is to compell temporal powers to live up to,
and enforce upon each other, the very norms of reason they invoke, however hypocritically.
This puts science —and social science in particular— at the epicenter
of the struggles of our age. For the more science is summoned by the dominant on behalf of
their rule, the more vital it is for the dominated to avail themselves of its results and
instruments. Such is the political meaning and purpose of The State Nobility : to
contribute to this rational knowledge of domination which, non obstante the jaded
jeremiads of postmodernist prophets, remains our best weapon against the rationalization
of domination.
NOTES :
1. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste (trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge, Harvard University Press; London,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984; orig. 1979).
2. Marcel Mauss, Manuel d'ethnographie (Paris,
Bibliothèque Payot, 3rd ed., 1989, orig. 1947), p. 7.
3. Max Weber, From Max Weber : Essays in
Sociology (edited by Hans Gerth and C.-Wright Mills, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1946).
4. Pierre Bourdieu, «Forms of Capital,» in John G. Richardson
(ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York,
Greenwood Press, 1986), p. 245. This article is a condensation of Bourdieu's generalized
theory of capital, including the latter's basic forms, their respective properties and
mechanisms of conversion, and the specificities of cultural capital.
5. Pierre Bourdieu, «Rites of institution,» in Language
and Symbolic Power (trans. Peter Collier, Cambridge, Polity Press, and Cambridge,
Harvard University Press, 1990, orig. 1982), pp. 117-127.
6. Marc Bloch, La société féodale (Paris, Albin
Michel, 1968, orig. 1930), p. 437.
7. Pierre Bourdieu, « Champ du pouvoir, champ
intellectuel et habitus de classe,» Scolies, 1, 1971, pp. 7-26; the more general
concept of field (champ) is discussed synthetically in « Some Properties of
Fields,» in Sociology in Question (trans. Richard Nice, London and Newbury Park,
Sage Publications, 1993, orig. 1980); for elaborations and exemplary illustrations, see The
Field of Cultural Production (trans. Peter Collier, Cambridge, Polity Press and New
York, Columbia University Press, 1993).
8. For a germane discussion of the seducements of ideographic
reduction with regard to Bourdieu's analysis of the French university field, see Loïc
J.D. Wacquant, « Sociology as Socio-Analysis : Tales of «Homo
Academicus»,» Sociological Forum, 5, Winter 1990, pp. 677-689.
9. The historical constitution of the opposition between
«money» and «art» in nineteenth-century France is retraced in Pierre Bourdieu, Les
règles de l'art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire (Paris, Editions du
Seuil, 1992).
10. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
(New York, New American Library, 1948, orig. 1925), p. 52.
11. On these cleavages, see, respectively, Ira Katznelson and
Margaret Weir, Schooling for All: Race, Class, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal
(New York, Basic Books, 1987), esp. pp. 208-221; Barbara Falsey and Barbara Heyns,
« The College Channel : Private and Public Schools Reconsidered,» Sociology
of Education, 57, April 1984, pp. 111-122; Peter W. Cookson, Jr., and Caroline Hodges
Persell, Preparing for Power : America's Elite Boarding Schools (New
York, Basic Books, 1985); Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel, The Diverted
Dream : Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in
America, 1950-1985 (New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989); William
Kingston Powell and Lionel S. Lewis (eds.), High Status Track : Studies of
Elite Schools and Stratification (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1990).
12. Cookson and Persell, Preparing for Power, op.
cit., p. 15. The figures that follow are also excerpted from this excellent study,
chapter 3.
13. Caroline Hodges Persell and Peter W. Cookson, Jr.,
« Chartering and Bartering : Elite Education and Social Reproduction,» Social
Problems, 33, December 1985, pp. 114-129.
14. Michael Useem and Jerome Karabel, « Educational
Pathways to Top Corporate Management,» American Sociological Review, 51, April
1986, pp. 184-200.
15. Michael Useem, The Inner Circle : Large
Corporations and the Rise of Business Political Activity in the U.S. and U.K. (New
York, Oxford University Press, 1984); Cookson and Persell, Preparing for Power, op.
cit., pp. 198-202; Michael Schwartz (ed.), The Structure of Power in America : The
Corporate Elite as Ruling Class (New York, Holmes and Meier, 1987); George E. Marcus,
Lives in Trust : The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late 20th-Century
America (Boulder, Westview Press, 1991); G. William Domhoff, The Power Elite and
the State (New York and Berlin, Aldine, 1993); Steven B. Levine, « The Rise of
American Boarding Schools and the Development of a National Upper Class,» Social
Problems, 28, April 1980, 63-94; and, for a historical perspective, E. Digby
Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen : The Making of a National Upper Class
(New Brunswick, Transaction Press, 1989, orig. 1958). It should further be noted that bona
fide membership in the American field of power via elite education continues to be
restricted to the white caste (cf. Richard L. Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff, Blacks
in the White Establishment ? A Study of Race and Class in America, New
Haven, Yale University Press, 1991).
16. Cookson and Persell stress that the « fit between
boarding school attendance and admission to elite circles » is anything but perfect
(Preparing for Power, op. cit., pp. 204ff) and indicate that children
from the American ruling class are increasingly unwilling to endure the self-denial,
isolation, psychic pain, and severe all-around life asceticism that bequeathal of power
henceforth requires. Not a few of them abandon prep school (or are expelled from them),
try to commit suicide, or simply opt to pursue other, less censorious, avocations.
17. « We hold that sociology has not completely achieved
its task so long as it has not penetrated into the innermost mind [le for intérieur]
of the individual in order to relate the institutions it seeks to explain to their
psychological conditions » (Emile Durkheim, « Sociologie religieuse et
théorie de la connaissance,» Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 17, 1909, p.
755).
18. For a fuller discussion of the two-way relationship between
habitus and field, see Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J.D. Wacquant, An Invitation to
Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press; Cambridge, Polity
Press, 1992), pp. 12-19 and 97-140.
19. In this, Bourdieu agrees with the late Philip Abrams, who
pointed out (in « Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,» Journal of
Historical Sociology, 1-1, 1988, pp. 58-89) that one of the main obstacles to the
sociology of the state resides in the special ability it has to secrete its own power.
20. Pierre Bourdieu, « Rethinking the State : On
the Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,» Sociological Theory, 12-1,
March 1994, pp. 1-19. Indeed, one might argue that the state must have captured a great
deal of symbolic power if it is ever to establish the legitimacy of its use of force.
21. Emile Durkheim, « Définition de l'État,» in Leçons
de sociologie (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), pp. 89 and 87.
22. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Towards History
(Berkeley, The University of California Press, 1984, orig. 1937).
23. Pierre Bourdieu, « The Scholastic Point of View,» Cultural
Anthropology, 5, November 1990, pp. 380-391; and Raisons pratiques. Sur la
théorie de l'action (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1994), « Un acte
désintéressé est-il possible?,» esp. pp. 161-167. For two stimulative interpretations
of Bourdieu's proposed «third way» between modernist rationalism and postmodern
relativism, see Craig Calhoun, « Habitus, Field, and Capital : Historical
Specificity in the Theory of Practice,» in his Critical Social Theory : Culture,
History, and the Challenge of Difference (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1995), pp. 132-61;
and Paul Raymond Harrison, « Bourdieu and the Possibility of a Postmodern Sociology,»
Thesis Eleven, 35, 1993, pp. 36-50.
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