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 Pierre
Bourdieu, one of the "master thinkers" shaping French intellectual
life, died in Paris on Wednesday, following a struggle with cancer.
A professor at the Collège de France, Mr. Bourdieu was among
the leading sociologists of his generation. His models of "habitus"
and "cultural capital" sought to account for how relations
of hierarchy and domination are reproduced within the various "fields"
making up a society.
 In the United
States, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment
of Taste remains his best-known work among scholars. However, Mr. Bourdieu
won a sizable nonacademic audience here for his essays against free-market
policy, many of which are found in the collection Acts of Resistance.
And in Homo Academicus and other writings, Mr. Bourdieu
applied his sociological methods to the analysis of the intelligentsia.
The picture that emerged was seldom flattering. Beneath his statistical
tables and often convoluted prose, Mr. Bourdieu often seemed
to be concealing (just barely) the gifts of a satirist.
The co-author
with Mr. Bourdieu of An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology,
Loic Wacquant is a professor of sociology at the University of California
in Berkeley. In a telephone interview on the day after Mr. Bourdieu's
death, Mr. Wacquant spoke from Paris about the thinker's life, work,
and legacy.
Q.
It's hard for Americans to grasp the extent of Bourdieu's prominence
in France. Analogies are sometimes made to Jean-Paul Sartre. Although
that comparison is fairly inappropriate, Bourdieu did occupy an absolutely
central position in recent years. How would you characterize his role?
A.
Le Monde, the major national daily, postponed publication of
its editions today in order to put news of his death on the front
page. The prime minister and various parties of the left have expressed
their condolences. He was very keen to bring the fruits of his scientific
work [in sociology] to bear on urgent issues. He has been a public
figure in public debates over the past seven or eight years in France,
but also throughout Europe, especially in Germany, where he is almost
better known than in France. He spoke against this new ideological
view of the world called neoliberalism -- the market solution
for everything. He brought his analyses of the worlds of science,
of art, of the media, of education to show the need to protect these
areas from the devastating and anti-democratic effects of the coming
reign of the commodity. He wanted to give the broadest possible range
of people the instruments to think for themselves, the critical tools
to get through the crust of preconceived ideas and discourses, so
they could collectively engage in enlightened civic debate. I think
he was very much a propounder of a new Enlightenment. He was
committed to reason, to science, to the role they should play in contemporary
societies.
Q.
Your description of his work is very much in keeping with Bourdieu's
insistence that his activity was social science, not philosophy. He
had some very hard words for the French tradition of the omnicompetent
intellectual. How do you understand the relation between his sense
of scientific rigor and his political activity in the 1990s?
A.
It was a change of form, but the content was always there. If you
go back to his earliest work on the transformation of the Algerian
peasantry under colonialism and markets and the nationalist war [published
in the early 1960s], there could be no more burning issue at the time
to work on. But if you read the work, it is a very rigorous, cold
analysis of the transformation of that society. From the very beginning,
his approach was to use the coolest, most methodical approach to reframe
the hottest, most burning matters of the day. You see it in his later
work on education. People were on the barricades in May 1968 with
his book The Inheritors [an analysis of French student life]
in their hands. His rigorous analysis of the transformation of the
educational system gave them instruments for understanding their own
life and society. What changed in the 1990s was the form in which
he expressed the civic dimension of his work. He had a very keen sense
that we lived in a pivotal conjuncture, that many of the institutions
of social justice and social protection, embodied in the welfare state,
could be destroyed in a few years. He began to write in a different
vein, in a more direct form, to influence public debates over retirement
funds, media, education, and so on.
Q.
Without reducing his thought to his biography, was there some personal
source for that mixture of cool rationality and political passion?
A.
He had a unique social trajectory. He came from a peasant background,
from a very small and isolated village, as far from the centers of
intellectual power as you could imagine. He had a very thick accent
from the south of France, he was the first in his family to finish
high school. And yet he had an extraordinary success in the educational
system. In his earlier incarnation, he was going to be a philosopher,
the next Sartre in a sense. But because of his background, he was
also not suited to the academic world; he was not a fish in water.
The encounter with the Algerian war was decisive. It led him away
from philosophy, away from the self-enclosed world of the mind, to
sociology as a discipline that is fully engaged in empirical research.
It required systematic involvement with the world -- counting
and observing, doing interviews -- rather than flying above
it, as philosophers do. And in the '60s, you have to understand, sociology
was a dead discipline in France; it was a pariah. It was status
degradation to go from being a philosopher to doing social science.
But he was committed to the application of science to society. The
combination of mastery of the philosophical traditions with the techniques
of fieldwork and statistical analysis put him in a unique position.
Q.
An important element of Bourdieu's work -- and the part that
really drew blood -- was his sociological analysis of intellectuals.
A.
For him, analysis of the inclinations and pitfalls making up academic
life was an absolutely necessary thing. If you don't know what determines
you -- how you are being shaped to think in a certain way because
of your professional interests, your proclivities, your membership
in a certain discipline, and so forth -- if you are blinded
already by all these biases, what chance do you have to produce rigorous
analyses of anything? That work made him controversial, and he was
vigorously opposed by some of his peers, who did not want to be under
the microscope. He demanded of academics that they be autonomous and
rigorous, and at the same time engaged, that they bring back to the
society the results of their labors -- and that they do so on
the basis of intellectual rigor, not on the search for personal visibility
or media fame.
Q.
What was Bourdieu doing in the final phase of his work?
A.
Perhaps the saddest thing is that he leaves us in the middle of a
mass of new projects. He had just published in France, a couple of
months ago, a book called The Science of Science and Reflexivity
-- a sociological analysis of the world of science, including
a very rigorous critique of the whole field of "science studies"
that has blossomed over the past decade or so. Three more books will
be coming out over the next few weeks. The first is a compendium of
his political writings, about five hundred pages, called Interventions
1961-2001. The second, fittingly, is a bibliography of his work,
which runs to 45 books and 500 articles. And, finally, there is the
book that Bourdieu finished just before falling ill, called The
Ball of the Bachelors. It's a set of ethnological essays about
his home village. It starts with a vivid description of a Friday-night
ball in which he notices that all of the men are standing around,
not dancing, because they are "unmarriable." He goes on from
this humble incident to make analyses of marital relations, the transformation
of the family, the symbolic devaluation of peasants, and so on. These
men had been neighbors and friends he grew up with. The book is beautiful,
very intimate, but also a remarkable study in ethnography.
Q.
Any posthumous writings his readers can expect?
A.
There is an unfinished manuscript on Manet that he worked on for years.
He shows that the revolution Manet's painting brought to the artistic
world is the same as that which Flaubert represents in literature.
It is in some way a very fitting topic for Bourdieu. He did for the
social sciences what Manet and Flaubert did in their fields. I think
it is going to take us 30 to 50 years to draw out fully the implications
of his work.
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