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PIERRE BOURDIEU
Critical Sociology and Social History
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And yet, he chose to become not a historian but a philosopher-turnedsociologist. In his most important writings, he refers much less to
historians than to philosophers, ethnographers and social anthropologists, and cites even fewerGeorges Duby, almost alone among his
French contemporaries. There are eminent historians whose names
are never mentioned, and Michelet is specifically rejected. Readers of
Homo Academicus (1984) know how he distrusted the sort of history
practiced at the higher levels of the French system. Despite his gratitude to Braudel, whose support was unqualified, he had no sympathy
for the longue dure approach of the Annales historians.5 He often noted
their lack of interest in a historical analysis of the concepts used in the
analysis of the past, in a reflexive use of history.6 The reproach is not
entirely just, especially to the Germansone thinks of the encyclopaedic
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffebut it is true that historians, apart from historians of ideas, show little interest in philosophy. Nor do philosophers
practice much history. In this respect, Hume in the eighteenth century,
and Croce and his school in the twentieth, are the exceptions that prove
the rule, though their historical works are not much read today.
Nevertheless, the past has a central stake in Bourdieus work since it
constitutes the soil in which the presents roots are plunged, forming
the basis for our capacity to understand our own times and to act upon
them. For my own part, like many historians, I have always admired
Bourdieu and have often been inspired by him. Had he wanted, he could
have been a great historian himself, which is manifestly not the case with
Foucault, Althusser or Derrida, to mention only the French thinkers best
known abroad. Bourdieu had the historians passion for the concrete,
the specific, the singular; he had curiosity and a gift for observing things
from a distancea capability that good anthropologists share with good
historians. Braudel liked to say: Historians are never on holiday. Each
time I take a train, I learn something. Bourdieu would have agreed.
Only someone with a natural gift for social history could have discerned
this characteristic of rural society:
The relative frequency of proverbs, prohibitions, sayings and regulated
rites declines as one moves from practices tied to agricultural activity, or
Pierre Bourdieu, Choses Dites, Paris 1987, pp. 556.
Pierre Bourdieu with Loc Wacquant, Rponses: Pour une anthropologie rflexive,
Paris 1992, p. 70.
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directly associated with it, . . . towards the divisions of the day, or moments
of human life, not to speak of domains apparently abandoned to chance,
such as the internal organization of the household, parts of the body, colours or animals.7
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existence.9 He knew that the purely private person should never be lost
sight of. That is why, as he wrote himself, this sort of self-analysis plays
a part in the conditions of development of my thinking. If I can say what
I say today, it is undoubtedly because Ive never stopped using sociology
against my social determinants and limitations; and used it above all
to transform the moods, sympathies and intellectual antipathies which
are, I think, so important in intellectual choices.10 Reflexive autobiography constituted a necessary part of Bourdieus thinking and his writings,
which were not a closed corpus but rather an incessant dialogue
sometimes repetitive, but always in development and unendingwith
his times. For him, history was precisely what allowed us to overcome
these obstacles. It is in discovering its historicity that reason gains the
means to escape historyThere is a history of reason; that doesnt
mean that reason can be reduced to its history, but there are historical
conditions for the social emergence of communication which make possible the production of truth.11
However, history is not only the gate one must enter to reach reality: it is
a central element of reality itself. I endeavour to show that what we call
the social is history through and through. History is registered in things,
in institutionsmachines, instruments, laws, scientific theoriesbut
also in bodies. My whole endeavour is an attempt to discover history where its hidden itself best, in peoples minds and in the folds
of their bodies. The unconscious is history. Thats true, for instance,
of the categories of thought and perception that we spontaneously
apply to the social world.12 Bourdieu appeals for a structural history,
which would reveal each successive state of the examined structure as
being at once the product of past struggles to maintain and transform
the said structure, and the principle of the transformations that flow
from it, through the contradictions, tensions and power relations by
which its constituted.13
Through his concept of fields (champs), Bourdieu himself hoped to do
away with the opposition between reproduction and transformation, static
and dynamic, or structure and history.14 As a historian of social transformations, I am only partly convinced. Certainly Bourdieus model helps
us to understand the upsurge of purely historical events, such as the
Sociology in Question, p. 15.
Choses Dites, pp. 36, 434.
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Rponses, p. 68.
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Logic of Practice.
Logic of Practice, p. 132.
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How to draw together these disconnected remarks on Bourdieus importance for historians? He is a thinker whose work largely converges
with that of historians, which was not the case with Foucaultwho
trawled history for illustrations to serve a pre-constructed narrative
or the structuralists who, imitating Althusser, tried to eradicate from
their systems what historians call history. More than many social
theorists, Bourdieu was constantly aware of three essential points.
First, it is impossible to reduce the vast territory in which humans act
upon nature and themselveswhether or not they know what they are
doingto a series of little gardens, run by a formal system of rules.
Second, it is equally impossible not to systematize human relations,
both in social practice and in the theory which analyses it. Third, its
always possible to show that things could have been otherwise, that it
happened differently elsewhere, under other conditionsand, I would
add, in the spirit of Bourdieu, I trustthat they did happen differently
in the past and will be different again in the future; and we will analyse
things differently, too.
If I may conclude with a personal observation. As a Marxist historian
of the British school, what initially brought me close intellectually to
Bourdieu, a friend whom I admired, was discovering my own historical problematic in his work on the Kabyles, which he would later
develop and generalize in The Logic of Practice. At stake for him, as for
me, was to know how men and women live in a period of historical
transformation. It turned out that we were both asking similar questions about comparable phenomena at roughly the same moment. The
question Bourdieu was asking about the Kabyles in the 1950s was how
we could understand the conditions of the acquisition of the capitalist economic habitus among people formed in a pre-capitalist cosmos.
My first book, written at roughly the same time and devoted to rural
Mediterranean societies, set out from an almost identical question.
Again, like Bourdieu, I understood that the structuralist models of social
anthropology didnt suit mealthough our reasons were different.25
To me they seemed too static, in other words anti-historical, and thus
incapable of explaining the evolution of the human species over the last
10,000 years. Like Bourdieu, too, I had nothing but contempt for the
relativism of the postmodernists.
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