Habitus: History of a Concept

Gisele Sapiro, cole des hautes tudes en sciences sociales and Research, Paris, France; and CNRS (Centre europen de sociologie
et de science politique), Paris, France
2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

Borrowed from the AristotelianThomist tradition, the concept of habitus was occasionally used in sociology and philosophy
to designate an acquired and stable disposition. While phenomenologists (Husserl namely) were interested in its role in the
construction of the self (ego) through past experience, it served sociologists such as Weber and Elias in their reection on the
collective dimension of attitudes and behaviors shared by a social group, be it religious (Weber) or national (Elias). Drawing
from these two traditions of thought (phenomenology and sociology), Bourdieu theorized this concept, relating it to his
theory of practice, which emphasizes the process by which individuals interiorize habits in their body through education.
Bourdieu applies the concept of habitus to social classes and their differing lifestyles.

Designating an acquired disposition characterized by its
stability, the concept of habitus originally derives from the
AristotelianThomist tradition. Whereas medicine appropri-
ated it to signify ways of being, and sickly states in particular,
by their external manifestations (general physical and facial
demeanors), the emerging eld of sociology (notably Weber,
Mauss, and Elias) designed it into a tool to conceptualize the
incorporated form of collective habits, which vary from one
society to another. Phenomenology, and Husserl in particular,
employed it to think about the characteristics of the self consti-
tuted by past perceptions and decisions, which have settled
into a prereexive state of consciousness. These two traditions
were synthesized by Pierre Bourdieu, who developed the
habitus into a chief notion of his sociological theory, linking
it with his theory of practice.
From Scholastic Philosophy to Phenomenology and
Sociology
The concept of habitus, derived from the Latin verb, habere, rst
appeared in scholastic philosophy in the sixth century in the
work of Boce, as a translation of Aristotles hexis, which
signies the positive dimension of the habit, which is guided
by reason and constitutes a virtue, unlike the ethos, which
refers to the passive repetition of acts. It is reappropriated in
the thirteenth century by Thomas Aquinas, particularly as he
examines the ways of acquiring faith in the Summa Theologiae.
Max Weber employs this concept in the context of his soci-
ology of religions to designate the psychological state that the
good of salvation bestows upon the religious person, and
which, notwithstanding the projection in the afterlife that it
implicates, is a habitus of the present (Weber, 1996,
p. 346). In his introduction to The Ethical Economy of World
Religions (191520), Weber describes the affective habitus
of the ascetic engendered through the specically religious (or
magical) act, through asceticism or contemplation (Weber,
1996, p. 347). He sets the active religious habitus that charac-
terizes the West against Eastern traditions, which he describes
as more contemplative. As he explains in the chapter of Economy
and Society dedicated to religion, the rationalization of the
appropriation of the goods of salvation consisted in elimi-
nating the contradiction between the daily religious habitus
and the extraordinary religious habitus, and in thereby assuring
the continuity of the religious habitus (Weber, 1996, p. 189).
The continuous and conscious religious habitus has become,
in the religions of Salvation and Deliverance, a method of reli-
gious salvation that seeks to mitigate the inebriety attained
through orgy (Weber, 1996, pp. 183189). Thus, as the sorcerer
requires rapture and a habitus dened by permanent charisma,
for the prophet, orgiastic inebriety runs contrary to an ethical
way of life. Instead of a sacred state reached through inebriety,
asceticism, or contemplation, it is precisely the sacred habitus
that will ensure the salvation of individuals. If, in The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (begun in 1904 and completed
in 1920), the term does not appear more than twice, and always
with respect to the religious habitus (Weber, 2008), Weber uses
it in his response to criticisms of the work in order to name that
which drove protestants to adopt behaviors in accordance with
primitive capitalism, and which found its origins in their reli-
gious life, family tradition, or lifestyle imbued with religiosity
(Weber, 1996, p. 155). He also wields this concept on several
occasions in Hinduism and Buddhism (191520) to designate
certain states leading to salvation, and particularly that of
nirvana, the habitus attained once ones ties to the world are
severed.
The Weberian denition is imbued with the concepts orig-
inal Thomist meaning, in so far as it refers to a virtuous way of
life based on deliberately adopted habits.
During the interwar period, the concept acquired a more
encompassing meaning, which was no longer restrained to its
religious dimension, and which came to also include habits.
While phenomenology emphasized individual consciousness
in its relationship to the surrounding world, sociology invested
its interest in collective consciousness and transmission.
Preferring the concept of habitus to that of habits as
a heuristic tool wielded to reect upon the properties of the
ego (Ich), Husserl uses it in Erfahrung und Urteil (1939),
translated in English as Experience and Judgment (1973), to refer
to the way in which perception remains intentionally attached
to an object beyond the rst experience that it has of that
object, transforming itself into latent knowledge capable of

484 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 10 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03085-3

reactivating itself each time it encounters the said object. This
concept thus simultaneously disagrees with empiricism and
inneism, for it supposes that perception is structured by an
acquired knowledge about objects situated on its horizon of
typical familiarity and precognizance (Husserl, 1939/1973,
p. 122). This is why Schtz translated the term habitus as
employed in Husserls work with that of habitual knowledge.
The ego is a substrate of habitualities, explains Husserl in
Cartesian Meditations (Mditations cartsiennes, originally pub-
lished in French in 1931): the term habitus, which appears
twice in the work (in sections 27 and 32), extends its scope
to include decisions taken in the past and transformed into
beliefs, convictions, which inform me, constitute myself as
a stable and abiding ego, forming ones personal character,
according to Husserls expression, or ones individual style,
to cite a term he also uses (Moran, 2011, p. 61). In this last
work, as in Ideen II (1952), Husserl insists on the double
dimension, passive and active, of the habitus: On the one
hand, there is prereexive daily action, and on the other
hand, there is critical reexive activity, which has a grip on
the former, for instance the decision one may take to retain
a belief (the second sort of habitus underpins the theoretical
habitus, which Husserl attributes to the scholar and the
philosopher).
This double dimension is also central in the (nonsystem-
atic) usage that Merleau-Ponty (1945/1976) makes of this
concept. It was above all against behaviorism, which reduces
action to simple reactions to stimuli (reexes), that the
French phenomenologist, nourished by his readings of
Husserl, developed his reection on the habitus as
a disposition, comparable to a productive synthesis rather
than the simple residue of past experiences. However, by
contrast to Husserl, the author of The Structure of Behavior (La
Structure du comportement, originally published in 1942)
situates this knowledge in the body and no longer in
consciousness. Neither automatism nor interiorized
knowledge, the habit is in the hands (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/
1976, p. 168). It is, as in a dance, through the kinesthetic grip
that learning is accomplished, it is the body that understands.
Foregoing a systematic usage of the concept, Durkheim and
Mauss integrate it into their reection on the process of social-
ization, or, in other words, the inculcation on young genera-
tions through their education of systems of ideas, sentiments,
and practices specic to the groups to which they belong,
such as religious beliefs, moral practices and beliefs, national
or professional traditions, and collective opinions of every
kind, as Durkheim writes in 1911 in an article on education,
its nature, and its role (Durkheim, 1922, p. 51; English trans.
1956, p. 72). Explaining the idea of conversion as invented by
Christianity in The Evolution of Pedagogy in France (Lvolution
pdagogique en France, 190405), Durkheim uses the concept
of habitus to qualify a general disposition of the mind and
will: a habitus of moral being (1938, p. 37; English trans.
1977, pp. 2829). In his 1937 article on the techniques of
the body, Marcel Mauss also introduces the bodily dimension
of the concept. According to Mauss, the term habitus translates
better than habit, Aristotles notions of the existing, the durable dispositions fundamentally characterize groups of
acquired, and the faculty. Contrary to the theory of Gabriel
Tarde, for whom the shared practices result from imitation, it
is, according to Mauss, through education, and particularly
Habitus: History of a Concept 485
through the training, the molding of the body, that are internal-
ized and incorporated, not only social representations, but also
rules of conduct and practices.
The term habitus appears occasionally under the pen of
Max Scheler, who, in Formalism in Ethics (1911), describes the
habitus of the chauvinist as being identical in every country,
manifesting the same discourses and the same attitudes, and
thus debunking the idea that the individuation of nations
implies a different sort of nationalism. It is not certain whether
this usage, which is closer to the common understanding of the
term in German (manner, attitude) than it is to scholarly usages
of the concept as developed in the work of Weber or in the
AristotelianThomist tradition, was a source for Norbert Elias
reection on the national habitus. In his work, Uber den Prozess
der Zivilisation (1937), translated into English as The Civilizing
Process, Elias evokes the psychological habitus of civilized
peoples, with respect to the discussion of notions of culture
and civilization, through which French and German customs
and traditions came to distinguish themselves from one
another. In The Society of Individuals (1939), Elias employs the
term habitus to designate the way in which a particular
form of behavior-control crystallized into a character or
a psychological individual habitus (Elias, 2010, p. 41). Elias
went on to systematize his usage of the concepts of social
habitus and national habitus in the 1980s, after the notion
was developed and popularized in the works of Bourdieu. The
social habitus shared by the individuals of a same group is the
expression of the particular forms of civilization characteristic
of that group, as Elias expresses in an essay on the notion of
civilization, written in 1986 (Elias, 2010, p. 5). In a text entitled,
Changes in the WeI balance (1987), in which he describes
how he relies on the concept of social habitus that he
sometimes likens to Kardiner and Lintons concept of the
personality structure in order to overcome the opposition
between individual and society, he explains how in differenti-
ated societies, this social habitus is composed of several
strata. In constituted nation-states, the national habitus takes
precedent over regional belongings, while in modern states still
in the process of construction, the contrary occurs. That national
habitus hampers European unication (Elias, 2010, pp. 164,
188, 197). In Studien ber die Deutschen (1989), he seeks to
comprehend German nationalism in order to understand the
rise of Nazism and what he calls the process of decivilization,
all while taking into account differences between classes and
social groups. Far from being xed, this national habitus, which
Elias distinguishes from the essentialist notion of national
character, transforms itself through the process of intergenera-
tional transmission. According to him, the advent of Nazism
can be explained by a long experience of submission to
autocratic regimes, closely associated with a code of obedience
within a hierarchical structure: The anchoring of an autocratic
form of rule in the habitus of individual people kept on creating
a strong desire for a social structure corresponding to this
personality structure (Elias, 1989/1996, p. 69).
Religious habitus, group habitus, national habitus, all of
these sociological usages have in common the idea that certain
individuals within which it is transmitted, and which vary
across space and/or time. Bourdieu would go on to apply this
concept to class differences.
486 Habitus: History of a Concept
Pierre Bourdieus Theory of Practice
The concept of habitus constitutes a key element in the socio-
logical theory of Pierre Bourdieu, in that it founds his concep-
tion of action as much as his notion of the perception of the
world. It is also at the heart of his analysis of social relations
and lifestyles that structure the social space. This concept and
the theory of practice that he associates with it were elaborated
during a conjuncture in the social sciences dened by a critical
paradigm shift. Although a bit younger, Pierre Bourdieu indeed
belongs, alongside Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, to the
generation that constituted and afrmed itself against the
branch of existentialism that then predominated in the intellec-
tual eld, pitting against a philosophy of the subject, a philos-
ophy without subject, challenging the reigning subjectivism
with the objectivism of the structures, setting against existen-
tialist or personalist humanism, what was then referred to as
an antihumanism. Against the rationalist tradition that,
from Descartes to Sartre, posits consciousness transparency
to itself, the emerging social sciences, in the wake of psycho-
analysis and Durkheimian sociology, honed in upon the gaps
between actions agents undertake and the consciousness they
have of them, which supposes an unconscious whereby the
individual is acted upon more than he or she is acting, without
necessarily reducing human behavior to a series of reactions to
stimuli, as does behaviorism.
Nourished by the studies he undertook in Algeria and in
Barn between 1958 and 1960, then in France in the 1960s,
as well as by his readings of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl,
Heidegger, Durkheim, Mauss, Saussure, Lvi-Strauss, Marx,
Weber, Panofsky, Chomsky, Wittgenstein, and so on, the
theory of habitus progressively elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu
during that period, participates in these questionings, to which
it offers an original response: Seeking to overcome the contra-
dictions between objectivism and subjectivism, mechanism
and nalism, structures and individuals, etc., it reintegrates
the experience of agents as partaking in social reality without
searching therein the full explanation of their actions, the entire
meaning of which is bound up in the system of hierarchical and
structured relations within which they take place. Above all,
Bourdieus habitus, following in the tradition of Mauss and
Merleau-Ponty, places the body at the core of the individuals
capacity to produce a series of responses more or less adjusted
to various situations.
The notion of habitus appeared for the rst time under
Bourdieus pen in a 1962 article on celibacy in Barn, in which
he referred to Mauss article on the techniques of the body:
describing a ball where peasants stand on the sidelines while
the girls dance with the boys from the city, he explains that
their habitus, that is to say, their physical properties physical
force, solidity, attachment to the earth which served to their
advantage in the precapitalistic era, came to constitute a hand-
icap for the process of reproduction, as demonstrated in their
inability to dance. The concept reappeared in 1967 in his post-
face to the French translation of Erwin Panofskys Gothic Archi-
tecture and Scholasticism, which Bourdieu published in the series
le sens commun of which he was the editor at Les ditions de
Minuit. According to him, Panofskys approach, which illumi-
nates the shared structural foundations of gothic architecture
and scholastic thinking, allows the reader to grasp the
collectivity at the very heart of individuality, in the form of
culture, that is to say, the habitus by which the creator partic-
ipates in and of his collectivity and his epoch, and which
orients and directs, in spite of him, his acts of creation that
appear to be the most unique (Bourdieu, 1967, p. 142; free
translation). Bourdieu directly draws upon Panofskys concept,
which its author himself derived from Thomas Aquinas, The
Sum serving as his model of scholasticism. Bourdieu denes
the habitus as a grammar generative of the thinking, percep-
tions, and behaviors that characterize a culture, by analogy
with Noam Chomskys notion of generative grammar in
linguistics. However, for Bourdieus habitus, this generative
capacity is not innate, as it is for Chomskys grammar, but,
rather, is socially acquired through education. In this regard,
Bourdieu refers to Durkheim and Mauss classic article on
The Primitive Forms of Classication (1903/2009). The site of
this habitus transmission and inculcation, which helps to
explain the structural homologies between activities as
different as the construction of cathedrals and scholastic
philosophy, is school. Panofskys approach invites us to seek
for the modus operandi (method of operation) of practices,
how they produce the work, rather than the mere decoding
of the opus operatum (the work wrought).
It is in Outline of a Theory of Practice (Esquisse dune thorie de
la pratique, 1972) that Bourdieu rst delivered a complete elab-
oration of his theory of practice, which he went on to reformu-
late in more systematic terms in The Practical Sense (1980a). His
reection on practice is anchored in a double criticism of objec-
tivism and subjectivism. Against the mechanistic visions of
structuralism and Marxism, which posit agents as mere
conveyors of structures or executors of rules or roles, Pierre
Bourdieu reintroduces the nalistic conception dear to
phenomenology, which describes behaviors and modes of
conduct as oriented with respect to objectives and underlines
their meaning, just as he reintroduces the subjective point of
view of agents, which, if it does not fully account for their
conduct, denitely guides and inects it. From this line of
approach emerged the notion of strategy, another key concept
of Bourdieus theory, which helps to reinvest agents with
a certain amount of inventiveness and improvisation, and to
explain their attitudes in relation to their perception of the
possibilities offered to them and, in particular, to the extent
to which they perceive such possibilities as probable, as well
as to their subjective hopes, more or less adjusted to their objec-
tive opportunities (Bourdieu, 1987, p. 75sq). Bourdieu
reproaches structuralism for its juridicism, which, according
to him, constitutes an intellectual bias: The researcher tends
to project the model he himself has constructed into the minds
of agents without problematizing the distance that exists inher-
ently between theoretical reconstruction and practice. This
confusion can also be observed in the polysemous use that
structural anthropology makes of the notion of rule, between
a norm that agents would consciously follow, a principle that
would unconsciously guide them, and a model constructed
by the researcher to explain the regularity of practices. Simi-
larly, the structuralist theory appears insufcient to Bourdieu
as a means of explaining the gift and countergift exchange,
most notably because of the temporal gap that ensures that
the giver can never fully know what the countergift will be.
This temporal gap, which also occurs in the challenge and to

the riposte, opens a space for agents to develop strategies more
or less adjusted to situations, following the rules of honor.
However, although trained in phenomenology, Bourdieu
never intended upon returning to the ultrasubjectivist nalism
of Sartrian philosophy, or to an intersubjectivity that ignores
the objective conditions of existence and the weight of the
structures within which agents are taken. He rejects subjectivist
approaches, which, from Sartrian existentialism to the theory
of the rational actor, suppose that action is the product of the
will of a conscious subject capable of projecting himself/herself
into the future as he/she anticipates the consequences of his/her
actions. He simultaneously contests the idea of total freedom of
choice and that of unbridled projection into the future. Drawing
on Husserls notion of protention, he distinguishes between occur between these in cases of dissonance between disposi-
long-term rational planning constructed around a future project
(the education of children, for example), which characterizes
capitalistic societies, from practical aiming at a yet-to-come
inscribed in the present, thus apprehended as already there
and endowed with doxic modality of the present, which
prevails in traditional societies, organized around a cyclical
calendar (Bourdieu, 1987/1990, p. 12).
The concept of habitus, conceived of as the generative
principle of individual practices, designates the capacity of
agents to orient themselves in the social world and to adopt
modes of conduct adapted to their objective conditions of exis-
tence without explicitly adhering to a rule, to improvise
attitudes adjusted to the situation at hand, just as a speaker is
capable of producing an innite number of sentences, with
only a few rules as his/her guiding framework, and without
speech being reducible to language. This concept is also what
permits us to overcome the alternative between mechanistic
approaches and nalism by lending an inventive dimension
to structures that have been incorporated in the form of dispo-
sitions. In large part determined by past experiences, the
habitus implies a degree of incertitude, of openness, and
a capacity for adapting to change. It is also linked to the logic
of practice, and thus to a certain vagueness and uidity.
In Chapter 3 of The Practical Sense (Le Sens pratique, 1980a),
entitled Structure, Habitus, Practice, Pierre Bourdieu proposes
that the reader thinks about practices and representations as
constituting the product of a process undergone by individuals
whereby they interiorize the social structures in the form of
dispositions. These systems of dispositions, which compose
the habitus, are structured structures therewith rendered
structuring structures. These structuring structures are schemes
of perception, action, and evaluation that orient the agents
vision of the world and individual modes of conduct in
conformity with the groups to which they belong (Bourdieu,
1980a, pp. 8889). Thus, the modes of conduct of individuals
belonging to a particular group are regulated, orchestrated,
without necessarily following a particular rule, or being explic-
itly concerted.
The conditions whereby such dispositions are acquired
through education explain the adjustment that occurs between
incorporated structures (dispositions, habitus) and objective
structures (things, institutions). Following in the line of
Durkheim, Bourdieu conceives of social facts as ways of being,
thinking, and acting that are more or less instituted, like in the
law, and more or less solidied in things. There is thus not
a difference of essence between incorporated structures and
Habitus: History of a Concept 487
objective structures, two forms through which social life
manifests itsef (Bourdieu, 1980b, p. 7). Furthermore, the
most ritualized or objective forms of social life are nothing
else than codied practices that have been institutionalized.
The illusion of immediate comprehension as evident, which
characterizes the practical experience of the world, its being
taken for granted, is the fruit of that adjustment between objec-
tive structures and incorporated structures. It also founds the
practical sense, that is, the capacity to adopt conducts that are
objectively adapted to situations without mechanically obeying
any specic rule. This theory allows one to thereby explain the
correlation that tends to be observed between objective proba-
bilities and subjective hopes, but also the disparities that can
tions and structures, in periods of crisis, social change, or
confrontation with another culture: Bourdieu evokes in this
regard the inertia effect or hysteresis of the habitus, which
resists change, and which often brings about sanctions as illus-
trated in the emblematic gure of Don Quichotte. The capacity
to adjust to new structures differs according to social groups
and the dispositions of individuals: Bourdieu (1977)
compares, for instance, the attitudes of Algerian subproletariat
workers who, unlike workers beneting from the stability of an
employment and thus more apt to adapt themselves to a capi-
talist temporality, are incapable of projecting themselves into
a rational future and tend, as a result, to have recourse to
a magical interpretation of the world. The illusion of an imme-
diate comprehension of the world is also at the origin of the
blindness that tends to prevail with respect to the principle
that founds this very illusion and of a certain resistance to
history, that is to say, to the study of its sociogenesis, which
is nevertheless the only approach that can denaturalize it.
The inertia of the past makes itself felt through habits
embedded in the body. The socialized body thinks, it is
a habituated body, as Bourdieu explains in Outline of a Theory
of Practice (Bourdieu, 2002, p. 297). The body is temporally
structured by the work of pedagogy, which consists in teaching
it to defer pleasures, to domesticate its impulses (to transform
hunger into appetite, etc.). However, the body is also the site of
practice, invention, and improvisation. This faculty for impro-
visation remains nonetheless limited by the agents conditions
of socialization, the habits they have incorporated that often
pose resistance a manifestation of their inertia to the
most conscious efforts they make to acquire mastery over their
bodies. All while taking into account this faculty for improvisa-
tion, which need not be grasped by reexive consciousness to
operate in an efcacious manner, the concept of habitus thus
traces the limits of the freedom of action and of the symbolic
mastering of practice.
The concept of habitus allows us to move on from practice
as a concept to practices and to their principles of differentia-
tion. In class-based societies, groups of individuals are differ-
entiated by their practices alimentary habits, practices of
consumption, ways of dressing, cultural practices, voting, etc.
These practices are strongly linked among themselves and
form lifestyles, manifestations of class-based habitus, but
they are also differentiated according to the predominance of
economic or cultural capital, as Bourdieu demonstrated in
Distinction (1979). These differences assume their full meaning
in a system of cultural oppositions that found principles
488 Habitus: History of a Concept
of classication that agents enact in their daily judgments
of others behaviors (for example, distinguished/vulgar,
elegant/rude, etc.). Far from being invariable, the practices
that characterize groups can evolve and even acquire nobility
when they are adopted by the dominant classes (like the punk
style that has been introduced into high fashion) or become
banal when they are vastly diffused (such as the practice of
tennis).
Bourdieu distinguishes between the primary habitus,
acquired by the child in the household, and the secondary
habitus, acquired at school. The schemes of perception, action,
and evaluation transmitted by the educational institution are
closer to the culture of the dominant classes than to the culture
of the dominated classes. The contradictory dispositions that
form the primary and the secondary habitus of individuals
belonging to the dominated class may produce what he calls
a cleft habitus. Such a cleavage within the individual habitus
can also result from migration (cleavage between national
habitus in Elias terms) or from contradictory habitus within
the family, for instance, between the values of the dominant
fractions of the dominant class and those of its dominated
fractions, as in the case of the French painter Edouard Manet
to which Bourdieu devoted a study (Bourdieu, 2013).
As a sense of the game, the practical sense is also what is at
work in the encounter between a habitus and a eld (Bourdieu,
1980a). Indeed, far from concerning only ritualized practices,
the logic of practice also prevails in intellectual and creative
activities. Practical learning plays a major role in the prepara-
tion undertaken for artistic professions (art, music, dance),
alongside a theoretical training that, indeed, does not always
provide the tools for symbolically mastering practice. This is
why the creative project, an extreme expression of intentional-
ist theories, does not sufce in attempting to account for an
artists work, as Sartre would have it. The encounter between
the habitus of a cultural producer and the space of possibilities
that his or her eld offers him or her is a much more powerful
explicative principle, which allows one to make the connection
between internal and external analyses of works, on the basis of
a theory of practice that emphasizes the modus operandi rather
than the opus operatum, even for an art as little taught as
literature (Bourdieu, 1994, pp. 5999). This theory of practice
thus provides the basis for a general theory of action that
extends from the most ritualized to the most inventive forms
of action without a break in continuity.
The concept of habitus, which was largely discussed
and appropriated by a number of researchers of different
disciplines, earned Bourdieu the accusation of determinism,
pronounced by certain critics who opposed him with the idea
of agency, without so much as noting that this capacity to
act was in fact at the very core of the concept of habitus and
manifested itself precisely in the form of strategies. The notion
of habitus is more sociologically precise than that of agency
because it allows for the denition of types (more or less
conscious) of agency, its variation according to groups and
individuals, according to their dispositions and to their trajec-
tories, as well as the limitations that this capacity comes up
against (interior, as well as exterior). At odds with rational
choice theory, the concept of habitus enables us to understand
how individuals are able to conduct their lives without always
being reexive, how they remain to a certain extent caught in
their past experiences, and how they are more or less able
to adapt to change.
See also: Bourdieu, Pierre (19302002); Chomsky, Noam
(1928); Durkheim, Emile (18581917); Elias, Norbert
(18971990); Field Theory; Foucault, Michel (192684);
Husserl, Edmund (18591938); Levi-Strauss, Claude
(19082009); Weber, Max (18641920).
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