Sociology and Philosophy in the Work of
Pierre Bourdieu, 1965–75

1

DEREK ROBBINS

University of East London

ABSTRACT

The paper first offers a brief account of the competition between the

Durkheimian sociological tradition and German philosophy in the period in which
Bourdieu was a student at the ´Ecole Normale Sup´erieure. It indicates the intel-
lectual influences of the early years that Bourdieu subsequently acknowledged and
then examines his use of the work of Weber in his first book, Sociologie de l’Alg´erie
(1958). The paper then focuses on the development of Bourdieu’s thought from
the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, a period in which he strategically presented
himself as an anti-humanist sociologist whilst also articulating a view of science
that was in tune with phenomenological and ontological philosophy. Bourdieu’s
‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945’ (1967a) receives particular
attention since his analysis of sociology and philosophy in France in the post-war
period was a key element in his own position-taking in respect of the two
disciplines. The paper then examines Bourdieu’s critiques of Weber at this time
and suggests that his dissatisfaction with Weber’s epistemology logically became a
dissastisfaction with the claims of sociological explanation as such. There followed
an attempt to reconcile a commitment to social science with an allegiance to
elements of phenomenological thought. The outcome was a willingness on
Bourdieu’s part to see reflexivity as a means to problematiz- ing sociological
explanation more than as a means to refining it or making it more sophisticated.
The consequence was that commitments to phenomenological ontology and
social science co-existed in this period. The balance was to change again subse-
quently in Bourdieu’s thought, and his responsivenesss to changing conditions
exemplifies how we should ourselves rethink the relations between possible future
social theories and the classical theories of Western sociology.

KEYWORDS

Bourdieu, phenomenology, philosophy, sociology, Weber

Journal of Classical Sociology

Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi Vol 2(3): 299–328 [1468–795X(200211)2:3;299–328;031196]
www.sagepublications.com

The specificity of the title is significant in two respects. Bourdieu insisted that the
relations between disciplines or modes of thinking are not immutable or atem-
poral. In particular, the relations between sociology and philosophy are, in his
word, ‘arbitrary’, or, perhaps more precisely, socially and historically contingent.
In part, this article explores Bourdieu’s representation of this contingency in
French intellectual life, but it is also an article that considers the contingency
within Bourdieu’s own intellectual production during one decade. I begin by
offering a brief account of the competition between the Durkheimian sociological
tradition and German philosophy in the period in which Bourdieu was a student
at the ´Ecole Normale Sup´erieure. I indicate, firstly, the intellectual influences of his
early years, which Bourdieu subsequently acknowledged, and then examine his
use of the work of Weber in his first book – Sociologie de l’Alg´erie (1958). I then
focus on the development of Bourdieu’s thought from the mid-1960s to the mid-
1970s, a period in which he strategically presented himself as an anti-humanist
sociologist whilst also articulating a view of science that was in tune with
phenomenological and ontological philosophy. Bourdieu’s ‘Sociology and Philos-
ophy in France since 1945’ (1967a) receives particular attention since his analysis
of sociology and philosophy in France in the post-war period was a key element in
his own position-taking in respect of the two disciplines. The article examines
Bourdieu’s critiques of Weber and suggests that his dissatisfaction with Weber’s
epistemology logically became a dissatisfaction with the claims of sociological
explanation as such. There followed an attempt to reconcile a commitment to
social science with an allegiance to elements of phenomenological thought. The
outcome was a willingness on Bourdieu’s part to see reflexivity as a means to
problematizing sociological explanation more than as a means to refining it or
making it more sophisticated. The consequence was that commitments to phe-
nomenological ontology and social science co-existed in this period. The balance
was to change again subsequently in Bourdieu’s thought, and his responsiveness
to changing conditions exemplifies how we should ourselves rethink the relations
between possible social theories and the classical theories of Western sociology.

The State of French Sociology in the 1920s

Georges Davy published Sociologues d’hier et d’aujourd’hui in 1931. It was a
collection of four studies – on Espinas, Durkheim, McDougall in relation to
Durkheimian sociology, and L´evy-Bruhl – that had been published in French
journals during the 1920s, preceded by an article on ‘La Sociologie Française de
1918 `a 1925’, which had first been published in English in The Monist in 1926. In
spite of the consideration of American social psychology in the third study, the
collection was narrowly nationalist. There were no references to American
sociology or to Marx or Weber. The assessment of past and present sociologists
indicated by the title amounted exclusively to a consideration of the progress of an
independent French tradition. Davy was a first-generation Durkheimian, which

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meant that he saw himself as a second-generation positivist. Born at the time of
Comte’s death, L´evy-Bruhl and Durkheim separately and differently as students at
the ´Ecole Normale Sup´erieure in the 1880s began to give intellectual and
institutional flesh to the emergent ‘sociology’ sketched in the Cours de philosophie
positive. Born in 1883 and also a student at the ´Ecole Normale Sup´erieure, Davy
became associated with the Ann´ee Sociologique ‘cluster’ (Clark, 1973) in 1910,
and as early as 1912 – five years before the death of Durkheim – published a
choice of Durkheim texts with an introductory study of his sociological system in
a series devoted to ‘Les Grands Philosophes. Français et ´etrangers’ (Davy,
1912).

Davy was an apologist for Durkheim. Writing his introduction to Socio-

logues d’hier et d’aujourd’hui in 1926, he celebrated the pioneering work of Saint-
Simon and Comte with ‘their idea of a distinct social reality, the object of a
distinct social science as objective as the other sciences’ (1931: 6), which was the
origin of a ‘positivist and rationalist sociology’ that, he argued, had been in eclipse
for a good quarter of a century. Davy was convinced that this sociology was going
to be reborn with the work of Espinas and spread with the work of Durkheim and
his school. During this period of ‘eclipse’ – presumably between 1900 and 1925 –
Davy was prepared to acknowledge the importance of the followers of Le Play,
particularly in respect of their methodology, but there was no doubt in his mind
that the future lay with the Durkheimians. He welcomed the editions of the work
of Saint-Simon which were published in 1924 and 1925 under the influence of
Bougl´e and the appearance of key posthumous editions of Durkheim’s work in
the mid-1920s, and he warmly praised Bougl´e’s own work and that of Fauconnet,
placing his own texts, particularly Le droit, l’id´ealisme et l’exp´erience (1922),
within the same increasingly dominant Durkheimian movement. The emergent
intellectual dominance was in the process of being underpinned by significant
institutional developments. At the end of his introductory article, Davy pointed to
the fact that sociology had now been accepted within the Licence and had also
been introduced as a subject for study in the ´ecoles normales primaires and for the
baccalaur´eat. The mutual support of institutional and intellectual trends was
consolidated by the production of several sociology textbooks, one of which was
his own ´El´ements de sociologie (1924). Davy was confident that he was part of an
unstoppable resurgence of sociological analysis that was still firmly attached to
the ideological and methodological commitments of the mid-19th-century
founders.

Influences on French Thought after 1930

Pierre Bourdieu was born in 1930 and he studied at the ´Ecole Normale Sup´erieure
from 1951 to 1955. The situation was by then far from what Davy had expected.
Shortly before the year of publication of Sociologues d’hier et d’aujourd’hui,
Edmund Husserl had given what were to be published as his Paris Lectures

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(Husserl, 1964). By the mid-1950s, Merleau-Ponty had researched the Husserl
Archive in Louvain and was influential in disseminating his ideas in France.
Lyotard wrote a small introduction to phenomenology in 1954 in which he
discussed Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and Bourdieu’s near contemporary at the

´Ecole, Derrida, was writing an introduction to a translation of Husserl’s Origins of

Geometry (Derrida, 1974). Also in 1954, Foucault participated in the translation
of Ludwig Binswanger’s Traum und Existenz, and wrote a long introductory
discussion of existential psychiatry for it. The influence of Heidegger was apparent
here as it had been in the work of Sartre during the 1930s leading to the
publication of L’ ˆEtre et le n´eant in 1943. Meanwhile, Raymond Aron had been
responsible for introducing the work of Dilthey, Rickert, Simmel and Weber in his
Essai sur la th´eorie de l’histoire dans l’Allemagne contemporaine (1938). Equally, of
course, Jean Hyppolite in particular had been responsible for the renewed interest
in Hegel and for the consequential rise of Marxist existentialism that has been
described in detail by Mark Poster (1975). In parallel with this French interest in
German thought in the period between 1930 and 1960 was the tangible effect of
the period of the Second World War on the institutional situation of sociology.
Davy’s confidence was misplaced, for very tangible reasons. Appended to Roger
Geiger’s article ‘Durkheimian Sociology under Attack: The Controversy over
Sociology in the ´

Ecoles Normales Primaires’ (in Besnard, 1983) is a letter written

in 1941 from the Vatican City by the Vichy R´egime’s ambassador to the Vatican,
who had been a civil servant at the time of the introduction of sociology into the
curriculum of the ´ecoles normales primaires, which Davy celebrated in 1931. L´eon
Berard wrote:

Let us return to the program of the ´

Ecoles Normales Primaires of 1920.

. . . to these normal school students who came from the Higher Primary
Schools, who had not done one hour of philosophy, they were going to
teach not philosophy, but, among the hundreds or thousands of diverse
systems, one fixed system of philosophy: Durkheim’s sociology. I must tell
you that for several years the teachings of that rabbinical ideologue had
become a sort of official and practically obligatory academic doctrine. The
sociologists were in possession of magisterial chairs at the Sorbonne. . . .
From them emanated the decisive and directing influences.

(Besnard, 1983: 135)

Only in 1941 could this anti-semitic opposition to sociology have been so clearly
articulated. There was, perhaps, an unholy affinity between the French vogue for
German philosophy that developed in the 1930s and the decline of French
sociology in the 1940s. Certainly, in the interview of 1985 in which Bourdieu
recollected his student days, he insisted that sociology teaching was intellectually
moribund and that his fellow normaliens treated the subject with contempt. Fed

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the line by his questioners that philosophy was dominated by a sociologist in the
early 1950s, Bourdieu replied:

No – that was just the effect of institutional authority. And our contempt
for sociology was intensified by the fact that a sociologist could be
president of the board of examiners of the competitive ‘agr´egation’ exam
in philosophy and force us to attend his lectures – which we thought were
lousy – on Plato and Rousseau.

(1990: 5)

Bourdieu was referring here to Georges Davy. Davy’s authority epitomized for
him the contemporary condition of Durkheimianism. It possessed institutional
capital but had forfeited intellectual capital.

Bourdieu’s Philosophical Training

In considering the relationship of Bourdieu’s work to the classical tradition of
sociology, it is important to keep firmly in mind the fact that he was trained in
philosophy and was not at all formally educated either as a sociologist or as an
anthropologist. For his diplˆome d’´etudes sup´erieures, he prepared a translation of
Leibniz’s Animadversiones in partem generalem Principiorum cartesianorum and
wrote a commentary on it under the supervision of Henri Gouhier, a historian of
philosophy. In one of his last interviews – with Yvette Delsaut (Delsaut & Rivi`ere,
2002) – Bourdieu did not deny that whilst he was teaching at the Lyc´ee in Moulins
from 1955 to 1956 he had registered to write a th`ese d’´etat under the supervision
of Georges Canguilhem on ‘Les structures temporelles de la vie affective’. It
appears that this did not materialize but, in the 1985 interview from which I have
already quoted, Bourdieu mentioned that he had ‘undertaken research into the
“phenomenology of emotional life”, or more exactly into the temporal structures
of emotional experience’ (1990: 6–7), and it seems likely that he was referring to
this unwritten or incomplete thesis. In the same interview, Bourdieu supplied
more information about the people who had influenced his intellectual develop-
ment when he was a student at the ´Ecole Normale Sup´erieure. There are several
important components of this development.

First of all, Bourdieu acknowledged that he had ‘read Being and Nothing-

ness very early on, and then Merleau-Ponty and Husserl’. He was, therefore, well
aware of what he called ‘phenomenology, in its existentialist variety’. He argued
that he had never ‘really got into the existentialist mood’, but, nevertheless
admitted that:

I read Heidegger, I read him a lot and with a certain fascination, especially
the analyses in Sein und Zeit of public time, history and so on, which,
together with Husserl’s analyses in Ideen II, helped me a great deal – as

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was later the case with Sch¨

utz – in my efforts to analyse the ordinary

experience of the social.

(Bourdieu, 1990: 5)

It is easily possible to discern from these acknowledgements the provenance of
Bourdieu’s concern with the problem of the temporal structures of affective life.

Secondly, the influence of Marx was negatively significant. In the 1985

interview, Bourdieu claimed that Marxism ‘did not really exist as an intellectual
position’ in the early 1950s in France, but that ‘I did read Marx at that time for
academic reasons; I was especially interested in the young Marx, and I had been
fascinated by the “Theses on Feuerbach” ’ (1990: 3). This was the decade before
Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique (1960) and before the brief intellectual
domination of Althusser. Bourdieu was well read in Marx but never committed to
Marxism or to the universality of Marxist explanation.

Thirdly, Bourdieu mentioned the influence of several philosophers whose

classes he attended whilst at the ´Ecole Normale Sup´erieure. He mentioned the
influence on him of Henri Gouhier, Georges Canguilhem, Gaston Bachelard, Eric
Weill, Alexander Koyr´e, Martial Gu´eroult and Jules Vuillemin, and commented
that:

All these people were outside the usual syllabus, but it’s pretty much
thanks to them and to what they represented – a tradition of the history of
the sciences and of rigorous philosophy . . . – that I tried, together with
those people who, like me, were a little tired of existentialism, to go
beyond merely reading the classical authors and to give some meaning to
philosophy.

(1990: 4)

There is a common thread that links many of the authors whom Bourdieu

cites. That thread relates to Kant in that many of the authors were engaged in
academic philosophical analysis of the relevance of Kantian epistemology to the
philosophy of natural science, either by reference to pre-critical philosophers such
as Leibniz or to post-Kantian thinkers such as Fichte (see, e.g., Gu´eroult, 1930,
1934; Vuillemin, 1954, 1955; Weill, 1963). These authors can, crudely, be put
into two categories of thinking: on the one hand, those, like Canguilhem and
Bachelard, who were particularly interested in developing a philosophy of science
or a historical epistemology with respect to scientific explanation; and, on the
other hand, those who were more concerned to engage philosophically with the
work of Kant, or post-Kantians like Fichte, or varieties of neo-Kantianism. In
different ways, however, this third strand of influence on Bourdieu’s thought
involved consideration of the social or historical contingency of scientific explana-
tion. We have Abdelmalek Sayad’s testimony (1996) that what was impressive
about Bourdieu’s teaching of Kant at the University of Algiers in the last few years

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of the 1950s was that it used Kantian philosophy to inform methodological
practice in social science observation. Bourdieu was interested in Kant and the
neo-Kantians to advance reflexive sociological inquiry. His interest in the Critique
of Practical Reason, for instance, was that Kantian insights should be deployed to
improve the exercise of reason in practice.

This disinclination to philosophize abstractly is also evident in Bourdieu’s

remarks about the fourth strand of influence on his early thinking – structuralism.
He attacked L´evi-Strauss for appropriating the linguistic science of Saussure in
such a way as to maintain the status of philosophy. Making glancing blows against
Foucault, Derrida and Barthes, Bourdieu criticized the tendency of the 1960s to
‘draw freely on the profits of scientificity and the profits associated with the status
of philosopher’ in using ‘the “-ology effect” ’ – archaeology, grammatology and
semiology – to give pseudo-empirical substance to theoretical speculation pre-
cisely at the time when, rather, it was necessary ‘to question the status of
philosopher and all its prestige so as to carry out a true conversion into science’.
In short, as Bourdieu put it, ‘although I made an attempt in my work to put into
operation the structural or relational way of thinking in sociology, I resisted with
all my might the merely fashionable forms of structuralism’ (1990: 6). Bourdieu
also lectured on Durkheim and Saussure at the University of Algiers, but his
interest, as in the case of the lectures on Kant, was methodological rather than
systematic – he was ‘trying to establish the limits of attempts to produce “pure
theories” ’ (1990: 6).

Bourdieu confirmed many of these influences in a paper that he gave in

Amsterdam in 1989. In the article that was subsequently published in English
translation as ‘Thinking About Limits’, Bourdieu wrote:

What I now very quickly want to address is the epistemological tradition in
which I have begun to work. This was for me like the air that we breathe,
which is to say that it went unnoticed. It is a very local tradition tied to a
number of French names: Koyr´e, Bachelard, Canguilhem and, if we go
back a little, to Duhem. . . . This historical tradition of epistemology very
strongly linked reflection on science with the history of science. Differ-
ently from the neo-positivist, Anglo-Saxon tradition, it was from the
history of science that it isolated the principles of knowledge of scientific
thought.

(1992a: 41)

This may have been a strategic statement, just as, equally, may have been the
remarks offered in the 1985 interview. The 1985 interview was with, amongst
others, Axel Honneth, who, at the time, was research assistant to J¨

urgen

Habermas, and Bourdieu may well have been wanting to emphasize the nature of
his philosophical trajectory away from academic philosophy towards practising
social anthropology precisely so as to differentiate his own position from that of

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Habermas. Equally, the Amsterdam paper was presented at the time in which
Bourdieu was seeking to emphasize the potential for universalization of the
particular French tradition to which he belonged in opposition to the threat of
universal conceptual domination posed by the American positivist tradition. This
was the period of his engagement with American social science as manifested in
Social Theory for a Changing Society, which he co-edited with James Coleman
(Coleman and Bourdieu, 1989) following a conference held in Chicago, and, in
particular, of Bourdieu’s Epilogue to that publication entitled ‘On the Possibility
of a Field of World Sociology’. These are necessary caveats to be entered in
relation to Bourdieu’s retrospective account in the late 1980s of his early
intellectual development. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I want to
examine some of Bourdieu’s earliest texts, especially some of those written
between 1965 and 1975 during the period in which he developed his distinctive
concepts and in which, I shall argue, he sought to reconcile his knowledge of the
classical tradition of sociological explanation with his philosophical disposition to
give social science a new kind of epistemological foundation.

Bourdieu’s First Book

The tension between philosophy and sociology had already been apparent in
Bourdieu’s first book: Sociologie de l’Alg´erie (1958). As I have already indicated,
Bourdieu’s intention was to transfer his philosophical interest in the phenomeno-
logical analysis of emotions and intersubjectivity to apply to the larger issues of
cross-cultural adaptation that he witnessed in relation to the Algerian response to
French colonial intervention in North Africa. He needed to establish a status quo
ante of Algerian cultures in order, subsequently, to analyse processes of cultural
adjustment. This was the motive forcing him to find ways of describing the
traditional organization of Algerian tribes. A descriptive sociology was a necessary
instrument to develop a descriptive phenomenology of acculturation processes.

Attention has always focused in particular on Bourdieu’s discussion of the

Kabyle culture in the second chapter of his book. This is understandable because
Kabyle culture was always a point of reference in his thinking, even, for instance,
as late as in his contribution to the discussion of gender issues in La domination
masculine (1998). Durkheim had also cited the Kabyles as evidence for the
existence of the kind of mechanical solidarity that he called ‘politico-familial’
organization in Chapter 6 of The Division of Labour in Society (1933). Bourdieu
did not cite Durkheim in the Bibliography or the text of Sociologie de l’Alg´erie,
but the two sources of information cited by Durkheim (Hanoteau and Letour-
neux, 1873; Masqueray, 1886). It seems likely, therefore, that Bourdieu’s inter-
pretation of the social organization of the Kabyles derived from the same sources
as did Durkheim’s interpretation, but there is nothing to suggest that Bourdieu
was endorsing Durkheim’s distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity
or, indeed, that he was engaging directly with Durkheim’s text at all. By contrast,

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Bourdieu’s Bibliography does contain Weber’s Gesammelte Aufs¨atze zur Reli-
gionssoziologie (1920–1). Apart from the mention of several American texts on
acculturation, the reference to Weber’s volume is the only explicitly theoretical
one in the Bibliography. There are also many references to texts on Islamic law
and Islamic religious practices (including Chelhod, 1958; Letourneau, 1950).
The discussion of the Kabyles focuses on berber law but has no reference at all to
religion.

It is the rather more neglected chapter on the Mozabite culture (Chapter

4) that mainly appears to be the product of Bourdieu’s reading in the secondary
literature that he cited. His discussion of the Mozabites overtly operated with the
language that is familiar to us from the first part of the Aufs¨atze that is separately
published as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, 1930).
Bourdieu started with the paradox of Mozabite culture – that it stimulated
sophisticated and dispersed commercial activity across North Africa whilst retain-
ing tight social and cultural cohesion. He sought to find the ‘why and the how’ of
this paradox, and Weber’s interpretation of the relationship between Calvinism
and capitalism provided a ready-made, off-the-peg explanation. The Mozabites
were adherents of a heretical sect of Islam and the heresy was based on two
principles derived from a strict interpretation of the Koran – that all believers are
equal and that every action is either good or bad. On this basis, Bourdieu
proceeded to describe the Mozabites as religious dissidents:

Thus these equalitarian rigorists, according to whom religion must be
vivified not only by faith but also by works and purity of conscience, who
attach great value to pious intention, who reject the worship of saints, who
watch over the purity of morals with extreme severity, could be called the
Protestants and Puritans of Islam.

(1958: 45/1962b: 39)

The adoption of Weberian terminology is blatant. The chapter has a sub-heading
called ‘Puritanism and Capitalism’ and it concludes that the soul and the life of the
Mozabites

. . . are organized around two distinct centers which stand in the same
opposition as the sacred and the profane. Thus it is that the modernistic
adaptation to the world of finance and business does not contradict the
rigid traditionalism of the religious life but, on the contrary, preserves it
and makes it possible.

(1958: 58/1962b: 54–5)

It needs to be said, of course, that Sociologie de l’Alg´erie was probably

written quickly in difficult circumstances as the Algerian War of Independence was
becoming more intense, and it also needs to be accepted that this was the first

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publication of a relatively young man. The point is not so much the inadequacy of
the analysis as the nature of the inadequacy. Bourdieu was prepared to use
whatever sociological explanations were to hand and which seemed plausibly to fit
the historical, ethnographic records with which he was working. He did not try
rigorously to defend the analogy that he deployed between Kharedjite Abadhites
and Calvinists, concentrating only on the formal similarities without referring to
substantive differences between dissident Islam and dissident Christianity, pre-
cisely because his interest was not at all in the validity of the sociological
explanation as such. Bourdieu’s accounts of the original social organization of the
Algerian tribes were only of interest to him in as much as they could be regarded
as objectifications of the putative subjective values of those people whom he was
to interview in their new situations in Algiers. The accounts were discursive
exercises. Although the first edition of the book was entitled Sociologie de
l’Alg´erie, the English translation of 1962 was entitled The Algerians, by which
time, also, the findings were differently presented. By 1962, Bourdieu, back in
France, had attended some of the research seminars of L´evi-Strauss, and the
English text contains diagrammatic representations of the social/spatial organiza-
tion of a Kabyle house that anticipate ‘La maison kabyle ou le monde renvers´e’
(Bourdieu, 1970b). This was Bourdieu’s most ‘L´evi-Straussian’ article, but it
subsequently became clear that there was no more conviction on his part about
this ethnological gloss than there had been in his use of Weberian discourse. What
we see in Bourdieu’s own critique of some of his earlier L´evi-Straussian pieces in
the first part of Esquisse d’une th´eorie de la pratique (1972) is not so much the
discovery of a new methodological position as the articulation of a position that
was able to accommodate the artificiality of the explanatory discourses that he had
exploited in his formative intellectual apprenticeship in North Africa. It is to this
process of articulation that we must now turn.

‘Champ Intellectuel et projet cr ´eateur’

Bourdieu’s thought always developed within the framework of an intellectual
matrix. He simultaneously pursued ideas within and between compartments so
that, for instance, the articulation of his philosophy and methodology in respect of
his Algerian anthropological research emerged in the early 1970s after a decade of
research and reflection that could be thought to belong to the sociology of
culture and education. The difficulty is to know where to break into this matrix so
as to try to represent it. However, I take as my starting point the article that was
first published in a special number of Les Temps Modernes in 1966 devoted to the
‘problems of structuralism’: ‘Champ intellectuel et projet cr´eateur’ (1966d). Since
returning to France from Algeria, Bourdieu had published two books arising from
his sociological work there, and also several articles that were pursuing lines of
inquiry derived from the Algerian studies – notably in relation to time, honour
and work. After several years lecturing at the University of Lille, Bourdieu was

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established as a lecturer in the ´Ecole des Hautes ´Etudes en Sciences Sociales and as a
researcher in Aron’s research group, the Centre de Sociologie Europ´eenne. He had
undertaken studies of the experience of students in French higher education,
particularly students of philosophy and sociology at the University of Lille when
he was teaching there. The same mixture of concerns was present in this work as
had been present in the Algerian research. Les h´eritiers: les ´etudiants et la culture
(1964) focused on the curriculum as a mechanism of acculturation, and Bourdieu
published the results of questionnaires that attempted to generate a profile of the
cultures of students prior to their academic studies. He had been involved with a
project on photography and photographic clubs, which resulted in the publication
of Un art moyen: les usages sociaux de la photographie in 1965, and also with a
project analysing the attendance at French, and then selected European,
museums/art galleries, which resulted in the publication of L’amour de l’art in
1966 (1966a). That year saw the publication of ‘Condition de classe et position
de classe’ (1966b) and ‘Une sociologie de l’action est-elle possible?’ (1966c),
both of which were essentially theoretical, the former in relation to structuralism
and the latter in opposition to Alain Touraine, but there had been very little
reason to anticipate the developed argument of ‘Champ intellectuel et projet
cr´eateur’ – neither the articulation of the concept of ‘field’ nor the application to
cultural history. The opening paragraph needs to be given in full. Bourdieu
began:

In order that the sociology of intellectual and artistic creation be assigned
its proper object and at the same time its limits, the principle must be
perceived and stated that the relationship between a creative artist and his
work, and therefore his work itself, is affected by the system of social
relations within which creation as an act of communication takes place, or
to be more precise, by the position of the creative artist in the structure of
the intellectual field (which is itself, in part at any rate, a function of his
past work, and the reception it has met with). The intellectual field, which
cannot be reduced to a simple aggregate of isolated agents or to the sum
of the elements merely juxtaposed, is, like a magnetic field, made up of a
system of power lines. In other words, the constituting agents or systems
of agents may be described as so many forces which, by their existence,
opposition or combination, determine its specific structure at a given
moment in time. In return, each of these is defined by its particular
position within this field from which it derives positional properties which
cannot be assimilated to intrinsic properties. Each is also defined by a
specific type of participation in the cultural field taken as a system of
relations between themes and problems; it is a determined type of cultural
unconscious, while at the same time it intrinsically possesses what could be
called a functional weight, because its own ‘mass’, that is, its power (or

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better, its authority) in the field cannot be defined independently of its
position within it.

(1966d: 865/1971d: 161)

This was a new voice and a new approach. Bourdieu was announcing that

the sociology of knowledge in general and of artistic production in particular
should not be predicated on the autonomisation of historical producers studied in
relation to a currently imposed construction of their supposed social contexts.
Rather it should be founded on the analysis of those impersonal, objective systems
within which communication takes place and within which meanings are imma-
nently established. Although Bourdieu cited Williams’s Culture and Society
(1958) in his article, nevertheless that book exemplified the approach that he was
seeking to criticize. For Bourdieu, Williams’s work placed texts and authors that
had been selected, evaluated and esteemed within the literary critical discourse of
high culture in relation to a hypostatized context that was the construct of the
equally high-culture discourse of social and economic history. The resulting
‘sociology of literature’ was not an analysis of the system of historical social
relations within which texts functioned but, instead, a current construction of a
representation of the past that was dependent on elements that had been falsely
rendered independent and that functioned ideologically in the present as a
creative project within a present intellectual field. Bourdieu’s fundamental objec-
tion was to the post hoc or detached imposition of a structure on phenomena that,
in fact, participate in the construction of their own structures.

Although this summary represents the emphasis of Bourdieu’s position, it

is, nevertheless, falsely realist. Bourdieu’s opening sentence is very important in
indicating the epistemology that he was taking for granted. There are two
components. There is, first of all, the insistence that sociological analysis entails
the analysis of the system of social relations within which individuals operate and
within which their individualities are defined, but, secondly, there is the insistence
that this way of seeing intellectual and artistic production is a necessary corollary
of adopting a sociological perspective. The ‘principle must be perceived and
stated’ concerning the boundaries of sociological explanation rather in terms
comparable to mathematical proof. There is no claim here that reality is being
analysed. The account of reality that is disclosed by sociology is a function of the
sociological mode of perception. It does not exclude other modes of perceiving
the same phenomena and offering alternative accounts of those phenomena.
Bourdieu was clearly committed to the sociological account that he was explicat-
ing but, nevertheless, the attainment of dominance in representations of reality
had nothing to do with the objective phenomena and everything to do with the
conflict between modes of perception or the contest between faculties. Although
the opening half-sentence may seem an almost casual introduction, it does
disclose Bourdieu’s attachment to a neo-Kantian epistemology and, already, a
willingness to apply that epistemology reflexively. As we shall see, it was also a neo-

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Kantianism that was derived from the Marburg School and, in particular, Ernst
Cassirer, rather than from Rickert, Windelband and the south-west German
School of neo-Kantianism. Rickert had written The Limits of Concept Formation
in Natural Science (1986) in order to argue that contingent individual behaviour
in history could be analysed not by adopting the procedures of natural science but
only by adopting an alternative methodology specific to and inherent in the
different phenomena. Bourdieu appears to have believed, instead, that delimita-
tions of explanatory discourses are themselves historically contingent. Limits have
to be acknowledged and declared, but they are not intrinsic. Bourdieu’s disquiet
about Weber’s methodology derives, in part, from the latter’s attachment to the
philosophical orientation of the south-west German neo-Kantian School. Bour-
dieu’s neo-Kantianism merged with Bachelard’s historical epistemology and
resisted transcendentalism. We have to accept that we proceed ‘as if’ sociological
explanation were valid (to use the title of a text by another influential neo-
Kantian, Hans Vaihinger [1924]), but we seek to make this provisionality
dominant for extraneous reasons.

Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945

There is no need to consider further here the substance of ‘Champ intellectuel et
projet cr´eateur’. For our purposes, the introductory passage of the article clarifies
Bourdieu’s purpose in writing ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945:
Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without Subject’ in the following year
(1967a). This was an article that was never published in French but only,
internationally, in Social Research. Within the international field of sociology,
Bourdieu was seeking to offer an ‘insider’ view of the sub-field of French
sociology to an ‘outsider’ readership. Within the article, therefore, he attempted
to provide an objective social history of intellectual relations in France between
1945 and 1966 from a systematically sociological perspective adopted at the end
of this period, whilst, at the same time, he endeavoured to contextualize his own
intellectual agency during those years. The experiment was as much an attempt in
the intellectual field to explore the boundaries of subjectivity and objectivity as, in
the anthropological field, his ‘C´elibat et condition paysanne’ (1962a) had been in
respect of the social situation in his native B´earn. Publication in Social Research
was an attempt to place the article outside the immediate field of production and
consumption that was the object of the article’s inquiry. The connection with
‘Champ intellectuel et projet cr´eateur’ was made explicit in the opening para-
graph. From the outset, therefore, the methodology adopted in the article was
linked to the position that Bourdieu had already articulated within the social and
intellectual trajectory under consideration:

The reader will find in this paper neither a systematic history of the
sociological or philosophical events and schools which have succeeded one

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another in France since 1945, nor a philosophy of the history of philoso-
phy or of the history of sociology, but a sociology of the main trends of
sociology which, in order to restore their full meaning to works and to
doctrines, tries to relate them to their cultural context, in other words,
tries to show how positions and oppositions in the intellectual field are
connected with explicitly or implicitly philosophical attitudes. It is with
this in mind that we have prepared this outline of a sociology of French
sociology, which aims at uncovering unconscious affinities rather than
describing declared affiliations, and at deciphering implicit purposes rather
than accepting literally declarations of intent.

(1967a: 162)

As this passage indicates, Bourdieu’s article focused on the changing relations
between philosophy and sociology in the particular socio-economic conditions of
post-World War II France. In Les h´eritiers (1964), Bourdieu had already inspected
the social contingency of the student selection of these subjects of study, and it
could be said that he was now analysing the social contingency of how these
subjects were themselves constituted for student consumption. It was an approach
that anticipated the abstract discussion of the ‘arbitrariness’ of curriculum content
in La reproduction (1970a), but the constant, tacit frame of reference was
Bourdieu’s own position-taking between the two intellectual disciplines – the one
within which he was trained and the other that he was employed to transmit. The
sub-text of his argument and of his position-taking related to the contemporary
vogue for quantitative sociological research ‘as it has developed in the United
States’. He contended, however, that such research ‘is ultimately nothing but a
neo-positivism that seeks its guarantee in American sociology and civilization’
(1967a: 164). He claimed, in other words, that the apparent indifference of
American empirical social science to philosophy and theoretical speculation was
predicated on positivist philosophy. Bourdieu found it ironical that empirical social
science could only re-establish itself in France by resurrecting the anti-
philosophical philosophy of the Comtist tradition.

The view that Bourdieu tried to express in the article was, essentially, that

the empiricist social science that was a form of neo-positivism was inadequate
precisely because it was founded on an inadequate philosophy of social science.
What was required was a new kind of empirical practice grounded in post-
positivist philosophy of science. Again, the irony for Bourdieu was that structural-
ism had generated humanist reaction because, like Durkheimianism, it seemed to
treat social facts as things, but the shortcoming of structuralism, as of
Durkheimianism, was that it was methodologically insufficiently anti-humanist.
Bourdieu paid specific attention to some articles by Merleau-Ponty, and argued
that in his ‘De Mauss `a L´evi-Strauss’ (1959) Merleau-Ponty ‘granted ethnology
its philosophical emancipation, but he did not fail to reserve to philosophy the
right to re-interpret – or, better, to arouse – the existential significance of the

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inanimate structures built up or discovered by the ethnologist’ (1967a: 167).
Bourdieu claimed that the accommodation between existential philosophy and
social science achieved by the intellectuals of the previous generation was one that
preserved freedom and voluntarism within a pseudo-scientistic and pseudo-
deterministic structural analysis whereas what was needed was the delimitation of
a social science theory and practice that, by concentrating on the systemic
relationalism of observed phenomena, would rule out any explanatory recourse to
the supposition of the existence of free human agency within those systems. Such
a supposition was, for Bourdieu, an interpolation from outside the immanent
system that was merely a projection of the disposition towards existentialist
philosophy on the part of the ‘scientific’ observers.

Bourdieu accused L´evi-Strauss of the same underlying humanist orienta-

tion, arguing that he ‘brought out in the role of the ethnologist what must have
surpassed the fondest expectations of a phenomenologist’ (1967a: 167) in the
following passage from his Foreword to Sociologie et anthropologie:

The apprehension (which cannot be objective) of the unconscious forms
of the activity of the mind nevertheless leads to subjectivation; for, after all,
it is a similar process that, in psychoanalysis, enables us to recover our self,
however alienated and, in ethnological investigation, to reach the most
alien of other persons as if he were another self of ours.

(L´evi-Strauss, 1950: xxxi, quoted in Bourdieu, 1967a: 167)

Bourdieu proceeded to argue that this humanist social science found support in
the intellectual climate of the years of Occupation, Resistance and Liberation. The
existential philosophy that was homologuous with social and political experience
during the period of its production did a disservice to social science by down-
grading it for 15 years. Bourdieu discussed the stance adopted by Sartre and was
only prepared to acknowledge that the latter’s intellectual endeavours were
beneficial in ‘breaking with the canonical rules and subject-matter of university
philosophy’, which had the effect of liberating ‘anthropological science from the
conventions that had held it prisoner’ (1967a: 180).

This was an influence that Bourdieu was recognizing as of latent value for

his own project, but the article looked next at the reaction to existentialism in the
early 1960s and he claimed that the emergent empirical sociology in France ‘was
founded on the illusion of a first beginning and, by the same token, on ignorance
of the epistemological problems posed by any scientific practice, as well as on
deliberate or unwitting disregard of the theoretical past of European science’
(1967a: 184). This epistemological ignorance was encouraged by the social and
economic conditions in which public and private bureaucracies began to look to
sociology to provide legitimation of their policy intentions. Bourdieu quoted
Lucien Goldmann’s then recent comment that ‘future historians will probably
identify the years 1955 to 1960 as the sociological turning-point in France

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between crisis capitalism and organization capitalism, accompanied by a transition
from philosophical, historical and humanistic sociology to the a-historical socio-
logical thinking of today’ (Goldmann, 1966: 6, quoted in Bourdieu, 1967a:
190).

The position Bourdieu was adopting in ‘Sociology and Philosophy in

France since 1945’ on the eve of the May events in Paris of 1968 is complicated,
but it can be summarized in the following way. The second-generation Durk-
heimians in whom Davy had placed such confidence in 1931 had, for Bourdieu,
lost contact with the pioneering intellectual achievement of the early Durkheim.
Durkheimianism had routinized positivism and had become assimilated to institu-
tionalized university philosophy. There had been a shift towards a spiritualization
of the conscience collective in Durkheim’s own late work and this had partly been
the consequence of seeking institutional accommodation with philosophical
opponents. The immediate post-war period had seen an explicable rise in liber-
tarian philosophy, and this had inhibited the progress of the scientific analysis of
social systems. Structuralism had accommodated phenomenology and philosoph-
ical individualism whilst American empirical sociology was becoming popular
because it presented itself as unphilosophical and, for this reason, was uncritically
compliant with the orientations of organization capitalism. What was needed was
an empirical social science that was grounded on a sound epistemology. One of
the problems of the war period was that the institutional links that maintained
dialogue between philosophy and social science were severed and, for a while, the
intellectual discourses existed in isolation from each other. Bourdieu pointed
hopefully to the fact that ‘all but non-existent between 1950 and 1960, research
workers with a philosophical background, and more especially graduates in
philosophy or from the ´

Ecole Normale, find their way into the research institu-

tions that had been established without them’ (1967a: 208).

The philosophers now cited as contributing to a new engagement of

philosophy with social science were Bachelard, Piaget, Gu´eroult, Canguilhem, and
Vuillemin, none of whom was associated with the dominant non-university
philosophy spearheaded by Sartre. The philosophies produced by these intellec-
tuals were

. . . predisposed, by the very object they choose for themselves and by the
way in which they approach it, to lend sociology the theoretical assistance
it needs, if only by posing the generic question of the conditions that make
possible any scientific practice.

(1967a: 211)

Significantly, Bourdieu also commented in a footnote that what these intellectuals
had in common was that they came from ‘working-class or lower middle-class
backgrounds and primarily from the provinces’ (1967a: 211 fn.54).

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Bourdieu’s purpose in writing ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since

1945’ is now clear. Having initially dabbled with L´evi-Straussian thinking in the
early 1960s, he had then, in seeking to present himself as a sociologist, been
tempted by American quantitative methods. The detailed statistical appendices to
L’amour de l’art suggest this temporary temptation. However, by 1966/7,
Bourdieu was committed to establishing a new reconciliation between philosophy
and sociology that would underpin the empirical practice of the research group
that he was to lead from 1968. Equally, he began to articulate a philosophy of
social science that would enable sociologists to be politically engaged without
accepting the Sartrian philosophy of engagement. At the same time, he sought to
outline a theory of social science that emphasized research practice and was quite
separate from the practice of university social science teaching. In his own terms,
he was about to begin the process of establishing an intellectual field of social
science discourse within which his own creative practices would be legitimated,
and it was logical that this preparatory period should culminate in the launching
of the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales in 1975, which was to
function for Bourdieu’s theory of practice as the Ann´ee Sociologique had for
Durkheimianism.

Emergent Philosophy of Social Science

These were very productive and significant years for Bourdieu. In 1967 (1967b)
he published his translation into French of Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and
Scholastic Thought (1957), concluding with a ‘postface’ the argument of which is,
in part, repeated in ‘Syst`emes d’enseignement et syst`emes de pens´ee’ (1967c).
Panofsky was a disciple of Cassirer, and Bourdieu was clearly interested in
Cassirer’s thought throughout this period. Not only did he cite Cassirer’s
‘Structuralism in Modern Linguistics’ (1945) and his ‘Sprache und Mythos’
(1925) in articles, but, as General Editor of Le Sens Commun series for Les

´

Editions de Minuit, Bourdieu was responsible for organizing the translations into
French of five works by Cassirer between 1972 and 1977, notably the three
volumes of La philosophie des formes symboliques (1972) and Substance et fonction:

´El´ements pour une th´eorie du concept (1977). Bourdieu produced Le m´etier de

sociologue in 1968 (1968a). This was subtitled ‘Epistemological Preliminaries’ and
was intended as the first of several volumes that would be of practical value to
research students. It offered a blueprint for the theory of sociological knowledge
that he was counterposing against structuralism. Indeed this was the title of an
article which appeared in 1968 in Social Research, almost as a companion piece
with ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945’. ‘Structuralism and Theory
of Sociological Knowledge’ (1968c) was never published in French. In 1970,
Bourdieu published La reproduction: ´El´ements pour une th´eorie du syst`eme d’en-
seignement (1970a). The following year he published both ‘Une interpr´etation de
la th´eorie de la religion selon Max Weber’ (1971a) and ‘Gen`ese et structure du

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champ religieux’ (1971b). There were other significant texts in these years, but I
want to highlight the section of the first chapter of Esquisse d’une th´eorie de la
pratique, pr´ec´ed´e de trois ´etudes d’ethnologie kabyle (1972), which was published
separately in translation in 1973 as ‘The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge’.
All these texts of these years, and others of the same period, cross-refer richly, but
I want to examine in detail the abstract statement of theory that Bourdieu offered
in ‘Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge’ (1968c); his application
of that theory in seeking to reinterpret the work of Max Weber; and, finally, the
consequences of his attempt to extend his theory of sociological practice in his
reconsideration of his Algerian fieldwork.

‘Structuralism and Theory of Sociological
Knowledge’

At the beginning of ‘Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge’,
Bourdieu insisted that the importance of structuralism was that it introduced a
new scientific method rather than that it was a new explanatory theory:

The theory of sociological knowledge, as the system of principles and rules
governing the production of all sociological propositions scientifically
grounded, and of them alone, is the generating principle of all partial
theories of the social and, therefore, the unifying principle of a properly
sociological discourse which must not be confused with a unitary theory of
the social.

(1968c: 681)

Bourdieu was trying to specify the boundaries of a ‘properly sociological dis-
course’ as much here as in the opening sentence of ‘Champ intellectuel et projet
cr´eateur’. The defining character of sociology lay in its method rather than in its
findings. It followed that classical theorists such as Marx, Durkheim and Weber,
‘totally different in their views of social philosophy and ultimate values, were able
to agree on the main points of the fundamental principles of the theory of the
knowledge of the social world’ (1968c: 682).

This was the guiding principle behind Le m´etier de sociologue (1968a),

which assembled passages from ideologically diverse sociological practitioners in
order to demonstrate and communicate the unity of ‘sociological meta-science’.
In accordance with Comte’s contention, the meta-scientific unity of sociology is
united with science in general. It participated in ‘the identity of principles upon
which all science, including the science of man, is founded’ (1968c: 682). Tacitly,
Bourdieu was attempting to rescue the correct understanding of Comte from
Durkheim’s distorting interpretation. Positivism was not advanced by Comte as
the particular methodology of the social sciences but, rather, social science was
simply the application to social relations of the principles underlying all scientific

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endeavour. Although this is never explicitly stated, Bourdieu’s position was
Comtist in that by rejecting ‘substantialist’ in favour of ‘relational’ thinking, he
was excluding religious, metaphysical or, more generally, humanist reference from
sociological method: ‘The originality of anthropological structuralism lies essen-
tially in the fact that it attacks from first to last the substantialist way of thinking
which modern mathematics and physics have constantly striven to refute’ (1968c:
682).

The influence of the non-existentialist philosophers of science is evident

here. Bourdieu’s article was devoted to seeking to explain the ways in which, to
count as social science, the abstract thinking of mathematics and geometry has to
be applied impersonally to social and cultural relations, which are essentially
relations between persons. As Bourdieu puts it:

To remove from physics any remnant of substantialism, it has been
necessary to replace the notion of force with that of form. In the same way
social sciences could not do away with the idea of human nature except by
substituting for it the structure it conceals, that is by considering as
products of a system of relations the properties that the spontaneous
theory of the social ascribes to a substance.

(1968c: 692)

Bourdieu on Weber

There is no space to explore the manifest influence here of Cassirer’s Substance et
fonction. The important point is that Bourdieu was seeking to make the identifica-
tion of immanent systemic relations the keystone of the sociological method
underpinning his research practice and that of his colleagues. In order to
legitimate the sociological practice that he was advocating, he wrote two articles
in which he deliberately distinguished his approach from that of Weber (in ‘Une
interprétation de la th´eorie de la religion selon Max Weber’, 1971a) and indicated
the ways in which his meta-scientific perspective enabled him to assimilate the
theories of religion of Marx, Weber and Durkheim in (‘Gen`ese et structure du
champ religieux’, 1971b). The title of the latter implies the basis of Bourdieu’s
critique of Weber in the former. For Bourdieu, Weber failed to acknowledge the
significance of the objective religious field within which individuals were consti-
tuted. By extrapolating ‘types’, Weber imposed extraneously constructed cate-
gories on situations that should be understood as categorially self-constituting.
Bourdieu made explicit the limited texts of Weber from which he was working,
and it would seem that he was now providing a critique of those texts that he had
uncritically exploited in Sociologie de l’Alg´erie (1958). Bourdieu argued in ‘Une
interpr´etation de la th´eorie de la religion selon Max Weber’ that a latently

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interactionist interpretation was always present in Weber’s analyses. To demon-
strate this, he pointed to four passages in which he claimed that Weber acknow-
ledged that the behaviour of conceptual ‘types’ – magician, priest and prophet – is
in reality constructed in interactive practice. Without denying Weber’s insights,
Bourdieu claimed that we can make a break from Weber’s explicit methodology to
disclose what he was really suggesting. However, we also need to make a second
break. The first break liberated the interactions of agents from the imposition of
typological conceptualization. The second break involves recognizing that agents
are not themselves autonomous. Rather, the analysis of the logic of interactions
has to be subordinated to an analysis of the objective structures within which the
interactions have meaning for the agents. Individual agency has to be understood
in terms of the ‘field’ within which it is exercised. Without this second break, the
danger is that interaction will be understood inter-subjectively or inter-personally,
leading to psychological abstraction. By working with explanatory ‘types’, Weber
used particular exemplars to analyse the general. Scientificity was constructed –
and voluntarism apparently avoided – by generalizing from particular case-studies,
but Weber failed to understand that his ‘types’ were actually the products of the
system within which they operated rather than autonomous instruments by which
the system could be extraneously explained by observers.

Bourdieu elaborated his objection most explicitly in the following

footnote:

Amongst the omissions resulting from his failure to construct the religious
field as such, Max Weber presents a series of juxtaposed points of view
which each time are derived from the position of a particular agent. The
most significant omission, without doubt, is the absence of any explicit
reference to the strictly objective relationship (because established through
time and space) between the priest and the original prophet and, by the
same token, the absence of any clear and explicit distinction between
the two types of prophecy with which every priesthood must deal – the
original prophecy whose message it perpetuates and from which it holds its
authority and the competing prophecy which it combats.

(1971a: 6 fn. 5)

2

Bourdieu proceeded to argue that a ‘religious field’ functions to satisfy religious
‘need’, but this can only be poorly defined if it is not specified in terms of the
needs of different groups and classes. Bourdieu claimed that Weber did not
attempt such an elaboration of the ‘constellation of interests’ in competition
within a religious field, even though he did feel obliged to take precise account of
the particular needs of every professional group or every class. In evidence,
Bourdieu referred to Weber’s discussion in ‘Status Groups: Classes and Religion’
and added: ‘Another analysis of the differences between the religious interests of
peasants and petit bourgeois town-dwellers can be found in the chapter entitled

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“Hierocratic Domination and Political Domination” ’ (Bourdieu, 1971a: 7 fn.7/
1987: 135 fn. 3). Again, Bourdieu was suggesting that Weber instinctively
appreciated that there were competitions for dominance that could only be
described in terms of interaction and could not be analysed typologically.

The example Bourdieu chose here to suggest the inadequacy of Weber’s

methodology is significant because the relations between peasants and town-
dwellers were the objects of his analysis in his Algerian work as well as in ‘C´elibat
et condition paysanne’ (Bourdieu, 1962a), and the difference between the
‘structuralist’ comparative analysis of the universalized concept of the ‘peasant
condition’ and the analysis of the structure of relations within particular systems
constituting the ‘peasant position’ was the starting point for the general discussion
in ‘Condition de classe et position de classe’ (1966b). What Bourdieu was arguing
here in respect of religious interests, he was also saying in respect of the political
field in ‘L’opinion publique n’existe pas’ (1971c).

A final example of Bourdieu’s critique of Weber relates to the notion of

‘charisma’. Bourdieu wrote:

As well as occasionally succumbing to the na¨ıve representation of charisma
as a mysterious quality inherent in a person or as a gift of nature . . . even
in his most rigorous writings Max Weber never proposes anything other
than a psycho-sociological theory of charisma, a theory that regards it as
the lived relation of a public to the charismatic personality. . . .

(1971a: 14–15/1987: 129)

Bourdieu’s claim was that Weber, at best, regarded charisma as something that
was invested in an individual by a social group. By contrast, Bourdieu contended
that charisma has to be understood to be an attribute that is comprehended
scientifically in terms of the objective structure of relations by which it is
constituted. It is measurable abstractly like a magnetic force and not by recourse
to social psychological interpretation. He concluded:

Let us then dispose once and for all of the notion of charisma as a property
attaching to the nature of a single individual and examine instead, in each
particular case, sociologically pertinent characteristics of an individual
biography. The aim in this context is to explain why a particular individual
finds himself socially predisposed to live out and express with particular
cogency and coherence, ethical or political dispositions that are already
present in a latent state amongst all the members of the class or group of
his addressees.

(1971a: 16/1987: 131)

In subjecting the work of Weber to an epistemological critique, Bourdieu

was consolidating the sociological methodology advanced in his ‘Structuralism

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and Theory of Sociological Knowledge’ (1968c). Bourdieu would appear to have
been repudiating the implicit phenomenology of his early fieldwork and the L´evi-
Straussian philosophical ethnology of his texts of the early 1960s, and legitimating
himself as the spokesperson, expressing himself ‘with particular cogency and
coherence’, for the new philosophical sociology that was the product of the social
and historical developments he had outlined in ‘Sociology and Philosophy in
France since 1945’ (1967a). The situation was, I believe, more complicated than
this, and the complexity has to be discussed in order to approach a proper
understanding of Bourdieu’s position in relation to the classical tradition of
sociology. He positioned himself within sociology by reference to a perceived
inadequacy of Weber’s methodology. Weber’s use of ‘types’ was an artificial or
arbitrary imposition on phenomena that possessed inherent systemic meaning. In
defining the boundaries of sociological explanation, however, Bourdieu was aware
that sociological explanation as such represented a discursive imposition that was
as artificial or arbitrary as ‘typological’ imposition within the discourse.

‘The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge’

In spite of Bourdieu’s criticism of Merleau-Ponty in ‘Sociology and Philosophy in
France since 1945’, he was only strategically renouncing his earlier phenomeno-
logical interests. The philosophical influence of Merleau-Ponty’s La structure du
comportement (1942) was particularly evident in ‘C´elibat et condition paysanne’
(1962a) and in Bourdieu’s development of the concepts of habitus and hexis,
whilst Merleau-Ponty’s La ph´enom´enologie de perception (1945) was reworked in
Bourdieu’s ‘El´ements d’une th´eorie sociologique de la perception artistique’
(1968b). At the same time as Bourdieu was defining the limits of social scientific
explanation, he was also reflecting on the pre-logical, ontological realities that
social science purported to describe. The framework of Le m´etier de sociologue
(1968a) was based on an adoption of Bachelard’s emphasis on the need to make
epistemological breaks so as to understand the social conditions of production of
scientific explanation. It appeared, therefore, to advocate a sociology of sociology
or a reflexive sociology as a necessary procedure for constructing and verifying
sociological findings. The epistemological breaks were presented as the means by
which sociological explanation could be refined. However, by the time that
Bourdieu published ‘The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge’ in 1973, the
epistemological breaks were serving a broader purpose. They were functioning to
allow the sociological analysis of sociological objectivism to become a means by
which ontic realities might be disclosed. The dense passage is familiar but needs to
be presented in full:

The social world may be subjected to three modes of theoretical know-
ledge, each of which implies a set of (usually tacit) anthropological theses.
The only thing these modes of knowledge have in common is that they all

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stand in opposition to practical knowledge. The mode of knowledge we
shall term phenomenological (or, if one prefers to speak in terms of
currently active schools, ‘interactionist’ or ‘ethnomethodological’) makes
explicit primary experience of the social world: perception of the social
world as natural and self-evident is not self-reflective by definition and
excludes all interrogation about its own conditions of possibility. At a
second level, objectivist knowledge (of which the structuralist hermeneutic
constitutes a particular case) constructs the objective relations (e.g. eco-
nomic or linguistic) structuring not only practices but representations of
practices and in particular primary knowledge, practical and tacit, of the
familiar world, by means of a break with this primary knowledge and,
hence, with those tacitly assumed presuppositions which confer upon the
social world its self-evident and natural character. Objectivist knowledge
can only grasp the objective structures of the social world, and the
objective truth of primary experience (from which explicit knowledge of
these structures is absent) provided it poses the very problem doxic
experience of the social world excludes by definition, namely the problem
of the (specific) conditions under which this experience is possible.
Thirdly, what we might refer to as praxeological knowledge is concerned
not only with the system of objective relations constructed by the objectiv-
ist form of knowledge, but also with the dialectical relationships between
these objective structures and the structured dispositions which they
produce and which tend to reproduce them, i.e. the dual process of the
internalization of externality and the externalization of internality. This
knowledge presupposes a break with the objectivist knowledge, that is, it
presupposes investigation into the conditions of possibility and, conse-
quently, into the limits of the objectivistic viewpoint which grasps practices
from the outside, as a fait accompli, rather than construct their generative
principle by placing itself inside the process of their accomplishment.

(1973: 53–4)

The Phenomenological Context

The way to make sense of this passage is to set it in a phenomenological context.
Robert Sokolowski’s brilliantly lucid Introduction to Phenomenology (2000) helps
us to understand what Bourdieu was doing in this passage. In a chapter entitled
‘An Initial Statement of What Phenomenology Is’, Sokolowski argues that in
order to understand what phenomenology is,

. . . we must make a distinction between two attitudes or perspectives that
we can adopt. We must distinguish between the natural attitude and the
phenomenological attitude. The natural attitude is the focus we have
when we are involved in our original, world-directed stance, when we

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intend things, situations, facts, and any other kinds of objects. . . . We do
not move into it from anything more basic. The phenomenological attitude,
on the other hand, is the focus we have when we reflect upon the natural
attitude and all the intentionalities that occur within it. It is within the
phenomenological attitude that we carry out philosophical analyses. The
phenomenological attitude is also sometimes called the transcendental
attitude.

(2000: 42)

Sokolowski clarifies the relationship between the two attitudes by specifying more
clearly the distinguishing characteristics of the phenomenological attitude:

There are many different viewpoints and attitudes even within the natural
attitude. There is the viewpoint of ordinary life, there is the viewpoint of
the mathematician, that of the medical specialist, the physicist, the politi-
cian, and so on. . . . But the phenomenological attitude is not like any of
these. It is more radical and comprehensive. All the other shifts in
viewpoint and focus remain cushioned by our underlying world belief,
which always remains in force, and all the shifts define themselves as
moving from one viewpoint into another among the many that are open
to us. The shift into the phenomenological attitude, however, is an ‘all or
nothing’ kind of move that disengages completely from the natural
attitude and focuses, in a reflective way, on everything in the natural
attitude, including the underlying world belief.

(2000: 47)

Viewed from this perspective, the first epistemological break advocated by

Bourdieu in ‘The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge’ enables objectivist
scientific knowledge, but the objectivism remains within the domain of natural
attitudes. The second epistemological break, however, enables an entirely differ-
ent perspective to be achieved in relation to all natural attitudes. By this
reconciliation or synthesis of a philosophy of science derived from Bachelard and
the process of phenomenological reduction derived from Husserl, Bourdieu was
able to maintain a strictly subjectless or anti-humanist methodology of social
science whilst allowing for the agency of beings within a life-world. Bourdieu’s
criticism of Merleau-Ponty and L´evi-Strauss had been that they both allowed their
philosophical positions to distort the truly positivist scientificity of sociological
investigation. His accommodation of philosophy and sociology allowed for a clear
demarcation between the possible achievements of sociology and ontology.
Bourdieu’s second epistemological break is not a meta-scientific posture within
the field of sociology. Instead, it represents a sociological way to phenomeno-
logical reduction. Sokolowski suggests that phenomenology offers two possible
ways to achieve ‘reduction’, ‘bracketing’ or the epoch´e. The first is a Cartesian way

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that subjects all to doubt, and the second is an ‘ontological way to reduction’ that
‘helps us to complete the partial sciences. We move out to wider and wider
contexts, until we come to the kind of widest context provided by the phenom-
enological attitude’ (2000: 53). Bourdieu’s insistence that ‘tout est social’
(1992c) enabled him to identify ontological and sociological analysis such that he
tried to subject all discourses to sociological reduction without privileging the
sociological practices of the natural attitude.

Bourdieu’s dual use of sociological inquiry has to be clearly stated. This

dual function explains the way in which throughout his career he sought to shift
intellectual perspective between differing public discourses or fields, sometimes
presenting himself as an anthropologist, a sociolinguist, a cultural sociologist or
philosopher, without relinquishing his fundamental commitment to a sociological
approach. He approached the Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (Gouldner,
1971) in the perspective of Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology (1970).

Summary

This article has focused on the brief period in which Bourdieu was both
legitimating himself within the field of sociology and simultaneously laying the
foundations for a ‘theory of practice’ that would subject all scientific discourses to
philosophical scrutiny. Although there is clear evidence for the suggestion here
that Bourdieu appropriated phenomenological thinking and grafted it to the
philosophy of science, it also has to be firmly said that he did not share the
transcendental dispositions of either Husserl or of some of the neo-Kantians.
Although he took advantage of the descriptive procedures of phenomenological
analysis, Bourdieu did not, unlike Husserl, believe that phenomenology secured
the supreme status of philosophy. As Sokolowski puts it: ‘To move into the
phenomenological attitude is not to become a specialist in one form of knowledge
or another, but to become a philosopher’ (2000: 47).

Bourdieu wrote The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (1991) to

show that Heideggerian philosophy could be subjected to sociological/
phenomenological reduction, and Pascalian Meditations (2000) was also an
attempt to celebrate the kind of philosophizing that would not become ossified as
academic philosophy. The truth, therefore, must be that Bourdieu exploited
phenomenology whilst rejecting its transcendental pretensions. In effect, phe-
nomenological reduction was, for him, an heuristic device within the natural
attitude that owed its pragmatic results to claims of transcendence that he did not
accept. We can conclude that Bourdieu’s relationship to the classical tradition of
Western European sociology was unique. As he sometimes stated, he was an
‘oblate’ – someone who could not fully let go of the intellectual position into
which he had been initiated, in spite of his scepticism. It remains to be seen
whether Bourdieu’s ambivalent resolution of his personal, social and intellectual

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323

inheritance – his habitus – will continue to provide the paradigm that we need for
an ongoing synergy between social research and philosophical reflection. If a
conclusion is appropriate when all situations require continuous intellectual
adjustments, my view would be that Bourdieu was aware that international social,
political and cultural developments are occurring that cannot readily be under-
stood by reference to a circumscribed discourse (sociology) generated in one
particular place and time (Western Europe from the middle of the 19th century).
The insight that I have explored in this article was that we now urgently need to
construct shared discourses that seek to theorize internationally shared experi-
ences expressed in particular and different conceptual languages. Bourdieu’s
R´eponses: Pour une anthropologie r´eflexive (1992b) was translated as An Invitation
to Reflexive Sociology. The English title missed Bourdieu’s point, and his emphasis
needs to be the starting-point for an endeavour that will have the possibility of
reviving social theory internationally without simply endorsing our local socio-
logical tradition.

Notes

1.

Throughout this text I refer to all collaborative publications with which Bourdieu was involved as
if they were the work of Bourdieu alone. The full details of authorship are given in the
bibliography. For a discussion of the way in which Bourdieu stimulated collaborative activity, see
the interview between Bourdieu and Yvette Delsaut in Delsaut and Rivi `ere (2002: 177–239).

2.

This is my translation. The footnote does not appear in the English translation of the article
(Bourdieu, 1987). Another footnote in this English translation indicates that it is a ‘slightly
modified’ version of the original French article and was written in 1985.

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Derek Robbins is Professor of International Social Theory at the University of East London, where he also
is Director of the Group for the Study of International Social Science in the School of Social Sciences. He
is the author of The Work of Pierre Bourdieu (1991) and of Bourdieu and Culture (2000); the editor of
the four-volume collection of articles on Bourdieu in the Sage Masters of Contemporary Social Thought
series (2000); as well as author of many articles on Bourdieu’s work. He is currently editing two further
collections of articles in the Sage Masters of Contemporary Social Thought series: the first set on Jean-

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François Lyotard; and the other a second, post-mortem, set on Bourdieu. He is writing a book on The
Internationalization of French Social Thought, 1950–2000 and is researching the influence of the French
reception of Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophy on the development of French social science.

Address: School of Social Sciences, University of East London, Longbridge Road, Dagenham, Essex RM8
2AS, UK. [email: [e-mail]]

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