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Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action
Do social classes really exist? Is disinterested action really possible? What do the family, the church, and the intellectual world have in common? Can morality be founded on hypocrisy? What is the "subject" of action? In this new volume, one of France's foremost social thinkers of our time responds to these major questions and to others, thus tracing the outlines of a work that could be called "Pierre Bourdieu by himself." In these texts, the author tries to go to the essential, that is, the most elementary and fundamental, questions. He thereby explains the philosophical principles that have led to his social science research and the idea of the human that guides his choices there. With the lucidity allowed by retrospect, Bourdieu brings out the fundamental theories of his greatest books, notably Outline of a Theory of Practice and The Logic of Practice (Stanford, 1990), and, with an eye to the future, presents the first results of his most recent work on the state, the anthropological moorings of the economy, and male domination. Bourdieu's theory is both a philosophy of science dedicated to revealing the objective relations that shape and underpin social life, and a philosophy of action that takes account of agents' dispositions as well as the structured situations in which they act. This philosophy of action is condensed in a small number of key concepts―habitus, field, capital―and it is defined by the two-way relationship between the objective structures of social fields and the incorporated structures of the habitus. All in all, this book should be an indispensable introduction to Bourdieu's work, not only to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, political science, and philosophy, but throughout the social sciences and humanities generally.
166 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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About the author
Pierre Bourdieu
352 books1,250 followersBourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions. He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.
Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).
Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).
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October 22, 2011
This book was quite hard going at times. I’m not sure how much of it I would have been able to understand without the bits and pieces of Kant’s philosophy I’ve picked up over the years. But, as he says at one point, the key to scholastic pleasure is ‘to play seriously’ – serious play is inevitably hard play and this book is very serious play indeed.
I hadn’t realised that Bourdieu had quite a different notion of classes to what I think most other sociologists have. He does not agree with the Marxist notion of classes, for instance, seeing this as an almost religious dogma. Rather, Bourdieu constructs a social space, one in which there are various kinds of capital (financial, social, cultural, aesthetic and so on) and people who inhabit this space have these in varying quantities of these different forms of capital. For example, a high school teacher may have lots of cultural capital, but not a lot of economic capital. A master of industry may have lots of financial capital, but virtually no cultural capital. By plotting the various kinds of capital across a kind of Cartesian plane you can then plot occupations and entertainments on that plane too. So, certain occupations are likely to be associated with certain entertainments – from opera and horse riding to jet skiing and tenpin bowling, from street sweeper to corporate lawyer – and those closest to you on this social space are more likely to have things in common with you. Their interests, in all senses, are likely to be your interests.
Marxism sees the coming revolution as ending class distinctions – for Bourdieu this is not really possible. What makes humans human is pretty much the distinctions they make between themselves and others. We do this in many different ways – but mostly through ‘taste’. To Bourdieu taste is not the Kantian notion of a universally disinterested faculty (despite it preferring to present itself that way), but rather one that is a manifestation of a social universe, a manifestation of the lived existence of a group of people with common interests on the social space they inhabit. The relationship between reason, agency and taste is at base dependent on the lived experience of the agent – of the subject, of the person that is doing the acting. Given a set of social conditions and motivations you tend to get particular reactions. The people with power get to see their version of these ‘universal laws’ (that is, the thought patterns or morality or aesthetics that best match their life experience) as being the only ones that are considered true and universal.
In the Marxist conception of the State, the state is an instrument of power of the ruling class used, ultimately, to defend the rights of property against the rights of the people – it is at heart violent and that violence is both real and always immanent. I suspect we are going to increasingly see this role of the state come to the fore over coming months and years. This part of Bourdieu’s critique of Marxism reminded me of Foucault – particularly Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. In that work punishment is seen as having started out as being a literal attack on the body of the prisoner – an attack that consisted in unimaginable (or rather, all too hideously imaginable) tortures of the prisoner’s body. But with time these torments moved from punishing the prisoner’s body to punishing the prisoner’s soul. The state works in much the same way and really only reserves physical suppression of people to very special (and rare) crisis situations – mostly the violence used by the state is symbolic violence, a violence that makes ‘natural’ certain inequalities and injustices. These are made to appear so natural that those who are most disadvantaged by them are convinced they exist either as a manifestation of natural law or, paradoxicall, operate in their own best interest.
There is a fascinating question that is asked at one point in this book, a question that is, in fact, the title of an entire chapter, ‘Is a disinterested act possible?’ This is the central idea of the book, although I needed to finish the book to understand how important that question actually was.
I need to start by explaining that disinterested does not mean uninterested. Uninterested means not interested. If you are not interested you are not going to act, you will only act if you are interested. A disinterested act is one where you will not profit or lose on the basis of the outcome of your action. So, the question stands – is such an act possible? The thing is that we need to be interested in the outcome of something to bother to act at all. We need to feel ‘part of the game’ to be bothered playing. And the more ‘part of the game’ we feel, the better we play the game. In fact, to play a game well is to be ‘ahead of the game’, in the sense that you have so adopted the idea of the game as being important that cynicism is not an option. But if that is true, if to play the game is to no longer believe it is a game, then what can it mean to be disinterested? Carrying this a bit further as a way to explain it – when watching a game of football we want the umpire to be disinterested, we don’t want the umpire to favour one side or the other, but that doesn’t mean we want them to be uninterested. There would be no point making me the umpire of a football match – not because I would unfairly favour one side over the other necessarily, but because I wouldn't give a stuff at all. No one wants an umpire who says at a key point of the game, “Who cares? It’s only a game, for god’s sake!” To be truly disinterested is only possible if I am completely interested – to the point where it is no longer a game, but has the meaning of reality itself. This is a very strange notion of disinterestedness, but I think he is absolutely right here. I’ve never before really seen this inversion of the relationship between uninterested and disinterested before. It makes me think of Buddhism, to be honest.
But this is not all. Kantian moral philosophy is based on the categorical imperative – which calls on you to act as if your moral maxim was a universal law. I’ll explain that briefly, as it is very important to what is to follow and you can’t really grasp Bourdieu’s overall point without understanding it. For Kant, we do not really have access to universally true laws which we can reliably act in accordance with to ensure our actions are good actions. The world throws many complications at us and our moral maxims tend to strain under the onslaught. What to do? Well, Kant suggested that we should act according to a moral principle that could be applied by anyone facing the same situation no matter who they were. That is, before you act you should ask ‘if everyone was to act in the way that I am proposing to act, would that be a good or bad thing?’ If the answer is a bad thing, if how you are proposing to act could not be applied by everyone universally to guide how they act, then your maxim is not a good maxim and you need to think again. In many ways this is an application of the ‘golden rule’, do onto others as you would have them do onto you.
Okay, before we can go much further we need some brief glossary items. Bourdieu talks of fields. A field is a kind of universe of being – like the education field or the business field or the aesthetic field. These fields have their own rules and can be quite distinct from each other. In fact, capitalism tends to reduce everything to the economic field, but often doesn’t like to admit this. So, no one likes to say what sex with their wife is worth in dollar terms, but prostitution is quite another field where the same transaction has a very definite financial exchange value. How we engage in these universes, these fields, Bourdieu refers to as our habitus. Habitus a bit like the ‘being ahead of the game’ we were talking about before – it is about having so assimilated the rules of the game that you flow in that universe. He makes this point clear by talking about his prostitutes again. He says that prostitutes tend to prefer sex in cars or in laneways than to sex in hotel rooms, something that seems rather counter-intuitive at first glance. His point is that most prostitutes have partners that they also have sex with. It is much harder to keep the habitus of sex as an economic exchange separate from the habitus of sex as a familial exchange if they both occur in the same setting. Therefore, having sex with a client in a car and a husband in a bed is psychologically easier to cope with than having sex with both in a bed. Habitus is therefore a way of behaving consistent with a particular field of existence and when these come into conflict we suffer from that conflict too.
He quotes proverb a couple of times in this, ‘Hypocracy is the homage paid by vice to virtue’. And this brings us to what I take to be the main point of these lectures and why this book is called (much to the amusement of two people who saw me reading this – two people who thought the word ‘practical’ could hardly apply to me) Practical Reason. Practical reason is concerned with finding ways to help us live good lives. But what is a good life? To Bourdieu a good life is one in accordance with the values of those you find around you on the social plane described earlier. That is, it is the morality that best exemplifies the lived experience of agents given certain conditions of existence. How do you encourage others to behave in moral ways? For Bourdieu this would involve creating incentives for them to be rewarded for acting according to his explanation of disinterest discussed above. That is, I will be disinterested in how I act and will act according to reason if there is an incentive and reward for my acting in that way. I will act in a disinterested way according to the precepts of ‘universal morality’ if I can be interested in that morality to the point where it is ‘the only game in town’.
Do you want people to behave in a particular way? Then the best way to ensure that is to make sure that the objective conditions of their life experience match and reward the kind of action we wish to see acted out. Agents act, in the main, in accordance with the rewards and punishments their objective life experiences present them with. If you want people to act in accordance with reason then you must reward and not punish them when they act in accord with reason. This final definition has gone a bit too far – it makes Bourdieu sound like a behaviourist. Rather, he sees our decisions to act as being a much more complex interaction between the symbolic violence of those in power constraining our actions, our own desire to fit in to a particular social group (and in distinction from groups we don’t want to belong to) and the rewards and punishments we experience in acting in the world.
The back of this book says it is ‘an excellent and accessible introduction to the work of Bourdieu’ – really, I’ve just scratched the surface of this book in this review, it is packed with ideas and insights – but to call it accessible is really stretching the friendship. This is hard, but worthwhile work, but work all the same.
I hadn’t realised that Bourdieu had quite a different notion of classes to what I think most other sociologists have. He does not agree with the Marxist notion of classes, for instance, seeing this as an almost religious dogma. Rather, Bourdieu constructs a social space, one in which there are various kinds of capital (financial, social, cultural, aesthetic and so on) and people who inhabit this space have these in varying quantities of these different forms of capital. For example, a high school teacher may have lots of cultural capital, but not a lot of economic capital. A master of industry may have lots of financial capital, but virtually no cultural capital. By plotting the various kinds of capital across a kind of Cartesian plane you can then plot occupations and entertainments on that plane too. So, certain occupations are likely to be associated with certain entertainments – from opera and horse riding to jet skiing and tenpin bowling, from street sweeper to corporate lawyer – and those closest to you on this social space are more likely to have things in common with you. Their interests, in all senses, are likely to be your interests.
Marxism sees the coming revolution as ending class distinctions – for Bourdieu this is not really possible. What makes humans human is pretty much the distinctions they make between themselves and others. We do this in many different ways – but mostly through ‘taste’. To Bourdieu taste is not the Kantian notion of a universally disinterested faculty (despite it preferring to present itself that way), but rather one that is a manifestation of a social universe, a manifestation of the lived existence of a group of people with common interests on the social space they inhabit. The relationship between reason, agency and taste is at base dependent on the lived experience of the agent – of the subject, of the person that is doing the acting. Given a set of social conditions and motivations you tend to get particular reactions. The people with power get to see their version of these ‘universal laws’ (that is, the thought patterns or morality or aesthetics that best match their life experience) as being the only ones that are considered true and universal.
In the Marxist conception of the State, the state is an instrument of power of the ruling class used, ultimately, to defend the rights of property against the rights of the people – it is at heart violent and that violence is both real and always immanent. I suspect we are going to increasingly see this role of the state come to the fore over coming months and years. This part of Bourdieu’s critique of Marxism reminded me of Foucault – particularly Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. In that work punishment is seen as having started out as being a literal attack on the body of the prisoner – an attack that consisted in unimaginable (or rather, all too hideously imaginable) tortures of the prisoner’s body. But with time these torments moved from punishing the prisoner’s body to punishing the prisoner’s soul. The state works in much the same way and really only reserves physical suppression of people to very special (and rare) crisis situations – mostly the violence used by the state is symbolic violence, a violence that makes ‘natural’ certain inequalities and injustices. These are made to appear so natural that those who are most disadvantaged by them are convinced they exist either as a manifestation of natural law or, paradoxicall, operate in their own best interest.
There is a fascinating question that is asked at one point in this book, a question that is, in fact, the title of an entire chapter, ‘Is a disinterested act possible?’ This is the central idea of the book, although I needed to finish the book to understand how important that question actually was.
I need to start by explaining that disinterested does not mean uninterested. Uninterested means not interested. If you are not interested you are not going to act, you will only act if you are interested. A disinterested act is one where you will not profit or lose on the basis of the outcome of your action. So, the question stands – is such an act possible? The thing is that we need to be interested in the outcome of something to bother to act at all. We need to feel ‘part of the game’ to be bothered playing. And the more ‘part of the game’ we feel, the better we play the game. In fact, to play a game well is to be ‘ahead of the game’, in the sense that you have so adopted the idea of the game as being important that cynicism is not an option. But if that is true, if to play the game is to no longer believe it is a game, then what can it mean to be disinterested? Carrying this a bit further as a way to explain it – when watching a game of football we want the umpire to be disinterested, we don’t want the umpire to favour one side or the other, but that doesn’t mean we want them to be uninterested. There would be no point making me the umpire of a football match – not because I would unfairly favour one side over the other necessarily, but because I wouldn't give a stuff at all. No one wants an umpire who says at a key point of the game, “Who cares? It’s only a game, for god’s sake!” To be truly disinterested is only possible if I am completely interested – to the point where it is no longer a game, but has the meaning of reality itself. This is a very strange notion of disinterestedness, but I think he is absolutely right here. I’ve never before really seen this inversion of the relationship between uninterested and disinterested before. It makes me think of Buddhism, to be honest.
But this is not all. Kantian moral philosophy is based on the categorical imperative – which calls on you to act as if your moral maxim was a universal law. I’ll explain that briefly, as it is very important to what is to follow and you can’t really grasp Bourdieu’s overall point without understanding it. For Kant, we do not really have access to universally true laws which we can reliably act in accordance with to ensure our actions are good actions. The world throws many complications at us and our moral maxims tend to strain under the onslaught. What to do? Well, Kant suggested that we should act according to a moral principle that could be applied by anyone facing the same situation no matter who they were. That is, before you act you should ask ‘if everyone was to act in the way that I am proposing to act, would that be a good or bad thing?’ If the answer is a bad thing, if how you are proposing to act could not be applied by everyone universally to guide how they act, then your maxim is not a good maxim and you need to think again. In many ways this is an application of the ‘golden rule’, do onto others as you would have them do onto you.
Okay, before we can go much further we need some brief glossary items. Bourdieu talks of fields. A field is a kind of universe of being – like the education field or the business field or the aesthetic field. These fields have their own rules and can be quite distinct from each other. In fact, capitalism tends to reduce everything to the economic field, but often doesn’t like to admit this. So, no one likes to say what sex with their wife is worth in dollar terms, but prostitution is quite another field where the same transaction has a very definite financial exchange value. How we engage in these universes, these fields, Bourdieu refers to as our habitus. Habitus a bit like the ‘being ahead of the game’ we were talking about before – it is about having so assimilated the rules of the game that you flow in that universe. He makes this point clear by talking about his prostitutes again. He says that prostitutes tend to prefer sex in cars or in laneways than to sex in hotel rooms, something that seems rather counter-intuitive at first glance. His point is that most prostitutes have partners that they also have sex with. It is much harder to keep the habitus of sex as an economic exchange separate from the habitus of sex as a familial exchange if they both occur in the same setting. Therefore, having sex with a client in a car and a husband in a bed is psychologically easier to cope with than having sex with both in a bed. Habitus is therefore a way of behaving consistent with a particular field of existence and when these come into conflict we suffer from that conflict too.
He quotes proverb a couple of times in this, ‘Hypocracy is the homage paid by vice to virtue’. And this brings us to what I take to be the main point of these lectures and why this book is called (much to the amusement of two people who saw me reading this – two people who thought the word ‘practical’ could hardly apply to me) Practical Reason. Practical reason is concerned with finding ways to help us live good lives. But what is a good life? To Bourdieu a good life is one in accordance with the values of those you find around you on the social plane described earlier. That is, it is the morality that best exemplifies the lived experience of agents given certain conditions of existence. How do you encourage others to behave in moral ways? For Bourdieu this would involve creating incentives for them to be rewarded for acting according to his explanation of disinterest discussed above. That is, I will be disinterested in how I act and will act according to reason if there is an incentive and reward for my acting in that way. I will act in a disinterested way according to the precepts of ‘universal morality’ if I can be interested in that morality to the point where it is ‘the only game in town’.
Do you want people to behave in a particular way? Then the best way to ensure that is to make sure that the objective conditions of their life experience match and reward the kind of action we wish to see acted out. Agents act, in the main, in accordance with the rewards and punishments their objective life experiences present them with. If you want people to act in accordance with reason then you must reward and not punish them when they act in accord with reason. This final definition has gone a bit too far – it makes Bourdieu sound like a behaviourist. Rather, he sees our decisions to act as being a much more complex interaction between the symbolic violence of those in power constraining our actions, our own desire to fit in to a particular social group (and in distinction from groups we don’t want to belong to) and the rewards and punishments we experience in acting in the world.
The back of this book says it is ‘an excellent and accessible introduction to the work of Bourdieu’ – really, I’ve just scratched the surface of this book in this review, it is packed with ideas and insights – but to call it accessible is really stretching the friendship. This is hard, but worthwhile work, but work all the same.
November 17, 2016
”Best-seller-ul nu este în mod automat recunoscut ca operă legitimă, iar reuşita comercială poate avea chiar valoare de condamnare. Şi, invers, artistul blestemat (care este o invenţie istorică: nu a existat dintotdeauna, ca şi ideea însăşi de artist) poate obţine din blestemu-i în această lume semne pentru alegerea sa în lumea de dincolo. Această viziune a artei (care astăzi pierde teren pe măsură ce câmpurile producţiei culturale îşi pierd din autonomie) s-a inventat treptat, odată cu ideea artistului pur neavând alte scopuri decât arta, indiferent la sancţiunile pieţei, la recunoaşterea oficială, la succes, pe măsură ce se instituia o lume socială complet deosebită, o mică insula într-un ocean de interese, o lume în care eşecul economic putea fi asociat unei forme de reuşită sau, în orice caz, putea să nu apară de fiecare dată ca un eşec iremediabil.”
February 26, 2020
Bourdieu. That's the comment.
parcialmente-leídos
July 25, 2017Bourdieu comienza estableciendo conceptos:
Filosofía de la ciencia: Es relacional porque da primacía a las relaciones objetivas (mientras que el pensamiento habitual o semicientífico del mundo social se ocupa más de “realidades” sustanciales: individuos, grupos, etc).
Filosofía de la acción: Es disposicional, porque considera las potencialidades del cuerpo de los agentes y de la estructura de las situaciones en que los agentes actúan (sus relaciones). Esta filosofía rompe con toda una serie de presupuestos y nociones introducidas en el discurso científico (como sujeto, motivación, rol, etc). Tiene como piedra angular la relación de doble sentido entre las estructuras objetivas (de los campos sociales) y las estructuras incorporadas (de los habitus). Conceptos fundamentales:
* Habitus: esquemas de obrar, pensar y sentir asociados a la posición social. El habitus hace que personas de un entorno social homogéneo tiendan a compartir estilos de vida parecidos. Los habitus son principios unificadores pero también generadores de prácticas distintivas (en cada entorno) y a la vez son clasificatorios entre por ejemplo lo que es distinguido y lo que es vulgar dentro de cada posición. Las diferencias determinadas por los habitus se convierten en simbólicas, son un auténtico “lenguaje” o “signo distintivo” de una posición. Estas diferencias solo son visibles si son percibidas por alguien capaz de establecerlas, alguien inserto en el espacio social.
* Campo: espacio social de acción y de influencia en el que confluyen relaciones sociales determinadas, es una red de relaciones objetivas entre posiciones.
* Capital: no solo hace referencia a la cantidad de bienes materiales o al dinero que se tiene (capital económico). Existe también el capital simbólico (en forma de honor, honradez, respeto…), capital cultural interiorizado (el que se da en las familias o por una circunstancia especial), capital cultural objetivizado (el visible en la acumulación de objetos extraordinarios, como obras de arte, libros…), capital cultural institucionalizado (los títulos, los diplomas, todo aquello que esté reconocido institucionalmente), capital social (aquello que se establece en relación con la sociedad), capital físico (el porte corporal, como somos exteriormente).
El investigador sociológico busca captar la lógica más profunda del mundo social, sumergiéndose en la particularidad de una realidad empírica, históricamente situada y fechada. Gracias a un montaje discursivo puede detectar la relación entre lo más abstracto y lo más concreto. Su objetivo es captar, en la variante examinada, lo invariante, la estructura.
Bourdieu critica la lectura “sustancialista” de la realidad, la que considera cada una de las prácticas y consumos (como el golf o la cocina china) en sí y para sí, independientes del universo de las prácticas sustituibles, y que concibe una correspondencia mecánica y directa entre posiciones sociales y prácticas. El pensamiento sustancialista cree que ciertas actividades o preferencias de individuos o grupos sociales están inscritos de una vez y para siempre en una especie de esencia biológica o cultural. Esto conduce a errores de comparación no solo entre sociedades diferentes sino también entre períodos diferentes de una misma sociedad. No se debe transformar en propiedades intrínsecas de un grupo (la nobleza, los samuráis, los obreros) las propiedades que solo tienen en un momento concreto del tiempo debido a su posición en un espacio social determinado y a un estado determinado de oferta de bienes y prácticas. En cada momento de cada sociedad interviene un conjunto de posiciones sociales relacionado con un conjunto de actividades o de bienes.
El espacio es el conjunto de posiciones coexistentes que se definen en relación unas de otras (por proximidad, alejamiento, jerarquía, etc). Las propiedades de una persona no son innatas sino que dependen de su posición. Dentro del espacio social los agentes y los grupos se distribuyen según el capital económico y el capital cultural. A cada posición corresponde un tipo de habitus producido por los condicionamientos sociales de esa posición, y a través de estos habitus, un conjunto de bienes y propiedades afines. El espacio de las posiciones sociales se traduce en tomas de posiciones (por ejemplo votar a la izquierda o a la derecha) a través del espacio de los habitus.
Bourdieu construye el concepto de clases teóricas pero no a la manera de Marx (como grupo movilizado en pos de unos objetivos comunes y en particular contra otra clase). Para él no existen las clases sociales sino que existe un espacio social (un espacio de diferencias) en el que las clases existen en cierto modo en estado virtual, no como algo dado sino como algo que se trata de construir.
El espacio social es la realidad primera y última, es el que ordena las representaciones que los propios agentes sociales tienen de dicho espacio. El individuo es un punto dentro del espacio social y tiene un punto de vista, una perspectiva determinada por el mismo.
Filosofía de la ciencia: Es relacional porque da primacía a las relaciones objetivas (mientras que el pensamiento habitual o semicientífico del mundo social se ocupa más de “realidades” sustanciales: individuos, grupos, etc).
Filosofía de la acción: Es disposicional, porque considera las potencialidades del cuerpo de los agentes y de la estructura de las situaciones en que los agentes actúan (sus relaciones). Esta filosofía rompe con toda una serie de presupuestos y nociones introducidas en el discurso científico (como sujeto, motivación, rol, etc). Tiene como piedra angular la relación de doble sentido entre las estructuras objetivas (de los campos sociales) y las estructuras incorporadas (de los habitus). Conceptos fundamentales:
* Habitus: esquemas de obrar, pensar y sentir asociados a la posición social. El habitus hace que personas de un entorno social homogéneo tiendan a compartir estilos de vida parecidos. Los habitus son principios unificadores pero también generadores de prácticas distintivas (en cada entorno) y a la vez son clasificatorios entre por ejemplo lo que es distinguido y lo que es vulgar dentro de cada posición. Las diferencias determinadas por los habitus se convierten en simbólicas, son un auténtico “lenguaje” o “signo distintivo” de una posición. Estas diferencias solo son visibles si son percibidas por alguien capaz de establecerlas, alguien inserto en el espacio social.
* Campo: espacio social de acción y de influencia en el que confluyen relaciones sociales determinadas, es una red de relaciones objetivas entre posiciones.
* Capital: no solo hace referencia a la cantidad de bienes materiales o al dinero que se tiene (capital económico). Existe también el capital simbólico (en forma de honor, honradez, respeto…), capital cultural interiorizado (el que se da en las familias o por una circunstancia especial), capital cultural objetivizado (el visible en la acumulación de objetos extraordinarios, como obras de arte, libros…), capital cultural institucionalizado (los títulos, los diplomas, todo aquello que esté reconocido institucionalmente), capital social (aquello que se establece en relación con la sociedad), capital físico (el porte corporal, como somos exteriormente).
El investigador sociológico busca captar la lógica más profunda del mundo social, sumergiéndose en la particularidad de una realidad empírica, históricamente situada y fechada. Gracias a un montaje discursivo puede detectar la relación entre lo más abstracto y lo más concreto. Su objetivo es captar, en la variante examinada, lo invariante, la estructura.
Bourdieu critica la lectura “sustancialista” de la realidad, la que considera cada una de las prácticas y consumos (como el golf o la cocina china) en sí y para sí, independientes del universo de las prácticas sustituibles, y que concibe una correspondencia mecánica y directa entre posiciones sociales y prácticas. El pensamiento sustancialista cree que ciertas actividades o preferencias de individuos o grupos sociales están inscritos de una vez y para siempre en una especie de esencia biológica o cultural. Esto conduce a errores de comparación no solo entre sociedades diferentes sino también entre períodos diferentes de una misma sociedad. No se debe transformar en propiedades intrínsecas de un grupo (la nobleza, los samuráis, los obreros) las propiedades que solo tienen en un momento concreto del tiempo debido a su posición en un espacio social determinado y a un estado determinado de oferta de bienes y prácticas. En cada momento de cada sociedad interviene un conjunto de posiciones sociales relacionado con un conjunto de actividades o de bienes.
El espacio es el conjunto de posiciones coexistentes que se definen en relación unas de otras (por proximidad, alejamiento, jerarquía, etc). Las propiedades de una persona no son innatas sino que dependen de su posición. Dentro del espacio social los agentes y los grupos se distribuyen según el capital económico y el capital cultural. A cada posición corresponde un tipo de habitus producido por los condicionamientos sociales de esa posición, y a través de estos habitus, un conjunto de bienes y propiedades afines. El espacio de las posiciones sociales se traduce en tomas de posiciones (por ejemplo votar a la izquierda o a la derecha) a través del espacio de los habitus.
Bourdieu construye el concepto de clases teóricas pero no a la manera de Marx (como grupo movilizado en pos de unos objetivos comunes y en particular contra otra clase). Para él no existen las clases sociales sino que existe un espacio social (un espacio de diferencias) en el que las clases existen en cierto modo en estado virtual, no como algo dado sino como algo que se trata de construir.
El espacio social es la realidad primera y última, es el que ordena las representaciones que los propios agentes sociales tienen de dicho espacio. El individuo es un punto dentro del espacio social y tiene un punto de vista, una perspectiva determinada por el mismo.
August 5, 2014
This is a weighty but accessible book. I was especially intrigued by his chapters on the family, on the economy of symbolic goods (gifts), and on the scholastic point of view. I learned that I am a 'Homo academicus,' given to serious play and of busying myself "...with problems that serious,and truly busy, people ignore..."
April 10, 2015
A very good book and for those of us who know Bourdieu's work the book is very easy to follow.
June 21, 2023
« poser en termes sociologiquement réalistes la question de la morale en politique ou de la moralisation de la politique, c'est s'interroger sur les conditions qui devraient être remplies pour que les pratiques politiques se trouvent soumises à un test d'universalisabilité. »
July 30, 2024
终于读完，给五星不是因为完全赞同Bourdieu，而是因为他的确无论如何是个“理论天才”——无论是原创还是再发明了其他学者的概念。以及，他自己的研究依然可以用于他自己。His correctness is just based on his own theoretical condition and his own symbolic alchemy to universalize his theory.
February 4, 2022
لن تجد عقلانية اجتماعية كعقلانية بيير بورديو وهو النحاّت المحترف للمفاهيم الاجتماعية والحرفي البارع في علم الاجتماع ، يمتلك ادواته اللغوية الخاصة التي بها ينحت الكلمات ليشكل من خلالها نمطية تفكير اجتماعي منفرد ، معالجاته للمفردات الاجتماعية " المكان الاجتماعي " مثلا متميزة فمن هذه المفردة يستطيع ان يخلق زوايا ومنحنيات زلقة في الفهم والاستيعاب لكنها صراخة في التركيبات الدلالية بين الفاعلين انفسهم ويبعدها عن التداولية الشعبوية الى الحيز العلمي .
من ممارساته العقلانية العملية فهم ظاهرة الرأسمال الجديد عندما يربط بين الرأسمال الثقافي والسياسي بالمكان الاجتماعي وهو ارتباط فعلي وعملي لتأصيل المكان الاجتماعي نفسه وذلك عبر إعادة بنية توزيع الرأسمال الثقافي وكنموذج له المدارس الخاصة " مدارس النخبة " التي تنتمي للنخبة السياسية والثقافية ذات المكان الاجتماعي نفسه والتي تنتج ما يسميه بيير " النبالة " وتتحول كل فئة في وراثة النبالة " السياسيين / كبار المدراء / الاطباء العظام " وغيرهم ، يغيب معها الكفاءة الاجتماعية ويحل محالها الاصطفاء الاجتماعي ، كما هو في الحقل الديني الذي يؤكد على اصطفاء انبياء واوصياء وخلفاء ومن بعدهم الحكام والملوك ، وهو نوع من إعادة انتاج السلك الديني الدنيوي نفسه بشكل متسلسل مترابط يساهم في تاكيد المكان الاجتماعي المعاكس لما يطرحه ماركس من مفهوم الطبقية الاجتماعية .
February 10, 2023
Siempre es impresionante leer a Bourdieu. De todos sus libros es el más sencillo y en el que se esfuerza por hacer puentes entre todos sus teorías para tener una visión global, que sorprendentemente tiene mucho sentido. Muy buena opción para familiarizarse con los conceptos de Bourdieu.
December 19, 2019
در فلسقه ی اجتماعی
July 28, 2021
Seems that Bourdieu confided in John Searle that the French public won't take you seriously unless you have a difficult to understand style. Be that as it may, this book of Bourdieu's is an easier introduction to his thought than "Distinctions," I believe his most famous book and where I started. Hre he takes the pure sociological approach, like his compatriot Durkheim, with which he does much. He gives a nice description of how one obeys: there is immediate adherence, but no explicit belief, as if there "was nothing else to do." Bourdieu describes this as being accomplished "when the mental structures of the one to whom the injunction is addressed are in accordance with the structures inscribed in the injunction addressed to him." But really seems like a description but in any true sense an explanation.
Bourdieu uses his concept of field to explain disinterested acts. He thinks of the "field as a space which one has not produced and in which one is born" but not an arbitrary game. Using this concept he claims that there can be disinterested forms of behavior that do not "have as a principle the calculation of disinterestedness." (p. 86-87).
Several forms of symbolisms loom large, as in symbolic capital (the meaning of which he claims to have made more rigorous than what went before), acts, interest, violence, informational and a few others. It seems somewhat incongruous to read that symbolic capital can be exchanged at a certain "exchange value" though of course he doesn't go so far as to assign a number to the value. I suppose someone may try (or has already tried) to model this kind of symbolic exchange to make it simulate economic markets even more, though that is not Bourdieu's intention.
I would say the pinnacle of his sociological approach is reached in the last chapter, "The Scholastic Approach," wherein he argues that anthropological potentialities, whether aesthetic pleasure or scientific or other, are fulfilled based on historical reality. These potentialities "find their full realization only under definite social and economic conditions." He gives a powerful manifestation of the scholastic bias as displaying a "tacit universalization of the scholastic point of view which is by no means accompanied by the will to universalize the conditions of possibility of this point of view." The problem is obviously that "skhole [leisure], as distance from necessity and urgency, and especially academic skhole . . . are unevenly distributed across civilizations." Even morality is historically anchored as "morality has no chance of entering politics unless one works toward creating institutional means for a politics of morality." The construction of the state is given a similar sociological treatment: "From its inception, social science itself has been part and parcel of this work of construction of the representation of the state which makes up part of the reality of the state itself (p. 39)" And the agents of the state "under the guise of saying what the state is, caused the state to come into being by stating what it should be (p. 58)".
But I think this approach fails when he applies it to the family in the appendix entitled "The Family Spirit." He refers to the family as a "realized social fiction" and says it is a "nominal fiction" turned into a real group. It may well be true that the modern family was bolstered by "a sustained effort of juridical and political construction," as we see with family tax credits in the US, but is that all there really is to a family? Not a word about evolution, reproduction, the biological basis of pair bonding or any similar consideration. I'm afraid that's a major shortcoming after all the progress made in evolutionary theory.
The book is only one hundred forty-five pages long, so there really are not enough historical examples to make his case more convincingly.
Bourdieu uses his concept of field to explain disinterested acts. He thinks of the "field as a space which one has not produced and in which one is born" but not an arbitrary game. Using this concept he claims that there can be disinterested forms of behavior that do not "have as a principle the calculation of disinterestedness." (p. 86-87).
Several forms of symbolisms loom large, as in symbolic capital (the meaning of which he claims to have made more rigorous than what went before), acts, interest, violence, informational and a few others. It seems somewhat incongruous to read that symbolic capital can be exchanged at a certain "exchange value" though of course he doesn't go so far as to assign a number to the value. I suppose someone may try (or has already tried) to model this kind of symbolic exchange to make it simulate economic markets even more, though that is not Bourdieu's intention.
I would say the pinnacle of his sociological approach is reached in the last chapter, "The Scholastic Approach," wherein he argues that anthropological potentialities, whether aesthetic pleasure or scientific or other, are fulfilled based on historical reality. These potentialities "find their full realization only under definite social and economic conditions." He gives a powerful manifestation of the scholastic bias as displaying a "tacit universalization of the scholastic point of view which is by no means accompanied by the will to universalize the conditions of possibility of this point of view." The problem is obviously that "skhole [leisure], as distance from necessity and urgency, and especially academic skhole . . . are unevenly distributed across civilizations." Even morality is historically anchored as "morality has no chance of entering politics unless one works toward creating institutional means for a politics of morality." The construction of the state is given a similar sociological treatment: "From its inception, social science itself has been part and parcel of this work of construction of the representation of the state which makes up part of the reality of the state itself (p. 39)" And the agents of the state "under the guise of saying what the state is, caused the state to come into being by stating what it should be (p. 58)".
But I think this approach fails when he applies it to the family in the appendix entitled "The Family Spirit." He refers to the family as a "realized social fiction" and says it is a "nominal fiction" turned into a real group. It may well be true that the modern family was bolstered by "a sustained effort of juridical and political construction," as we see with family tax credits in the US, but is that all there really is to a family? Not a word about evolution, reproduction, the biological basis of pair bonding or any similar consideration. I'm afraid that's a major shortcoming after all the progress made in evolutionary theory.
The book is only one hundred forty-five pages long, so there really are not enough historical examples to make his case more convincingly.
July 13, 2023
I found the book to be very interesting since the topics correspond to my interests in culture and society. Bourdieu has language and frameworks for looking at human life that I find pertinent and helpful, for example the expansion of the idea of "capital" beyond monetary assets to the various types of assets and talents that come our way or that can be developed. Extending a key word in economics invites us to extend economics itself.
For me the book wasn't difficult to follow since somewhere along the line I developed the ability to read long sentences and pay attention to how an author uses vocabulary. If I ran into problems I just googled other reader's comments on Bourdieu to steer me in the right direction.
For me the book wasn't difficult to follow since somewhere along the line I developed the ability to read long sentences and pay attention to how an author uses vocabulary. If I ran into problems I just googled other reader's comments on Bourdieu to steer me in the right direction.
April 22, 2025
"Il piacere di sentirsi scaltri, demistificati e demistificatori, di atteggiarsi a disincantati e a disincantatori, è al principio di molti errori scientifici, se non altro perché porta a dimenticare che l'illusione denunciata fa parte della realtà e deve essere inscritta nel modello destinato a darne ragione che, in un primo momento, può essere costruito solo contro di essa."
June 9, 2025
I only read this book because ChatGPT suggested it as a pre-read to Bordieu's Distinction.
I found it a bit too high level or philosophical for me... but at the time I found it super interesting and informing to look at the behavior of humans with the 'capital' lens. How people generally behave to acquire social, economic, or cultural capital.
I found it a bit too high level or philosophical for me... but at the time I found it super interesting and informing to look at the behavior of humans with the 'capital' lens. How people generally behave to acquire social, economic, or cultural capital.
August 30, 2020
Though I read it in Swedish, still not an easy read. As usual, Bourdieu has interesting perspectives on society, and it was interesting to read about his concept of the "economy of symbolic assets".
Read
February 14, 2023girl help I understand illusio now
March 10, 2024
1ere fois que je lis bourdieu c’était dur 😓
April 12, 2024
مترجم گاهی در کارش وامانده بود.
June 23, 2022
I thought the book was very good and funny.
November 20, 2012
I originally would have given the book 5 stars but I started reading Distinction and I realized that it takes a work the length of Distinction to really teach the ideas within this little book. I definitely recommend it as a starting point -- but if you are like me you will really begin to get satisfaction when you crack open Distinction (I hope the same is true with an Outline of A Theory of Practice, which is next on the list).
February 5, 2012
I read this when I assigned it for a graduate theory seminar -- looking for a more approachable Bourdieu for myself and the students. It really worked, and changed my whole attitude toward him. This is the first time the whole thing about different kinds of capital really clicked. I fell hard.
December 4, 2007
It summarizes concepts from distinction nicely, but in lecture form, which can leave something to be desired.
July 26, 2013
Bourdieu addresses a few controversial issues about his previous work. Interesting and challenging, though a bit difficult for beginners as my humble self.
June 3, 2015
Bourdieu for president - (says one badge I own)
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