The Bourdieu paradigm

The origins and evolution of an intellectual social project

Derek Robbins

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526127716
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Analysing the work of Schutz, Gurwitsch, Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu, this book considers the historical development of competing philosophies of social science. It examines the relations between phenomenology, Gestalt psychology and empirical social science in the first half of the twentieth century and then explores the way in which Bourdieu responded to this legacy by advocating a form of reflexive social-scientific investigation, which would remain faithful to primary experience without disowning accumulated intellectualism. The book asks whether the Bourdieu 'paradigm' retains value beyond the French conditions of its production. It offers an analysis of the development of Bourdieu's thought and practice which constitutes an invitation to readers generally to reassess the value of the western tradition of the social function of the detached intellectual for mass democratic societies.

II
Pierre Bourdieu. Evolution of an intellectual social project

Anyone already familiar with the work of Bourdieu will have noticed the affinities between his thinking and that of Merleau-Ponty, itself expressed in language derived from the phenomenological movement as represented, in part, in the work of Schutz and Gurwitsch. Some instances are indicative. Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the nature of ‘habits’ as forms of ‘apprenticeship’ resonates with Bourdieu’s use of the concept of ‘habitus’ and its function in ‘pedagogic work’. His argument that an emphasis on perception requires an ‘inversion of the movement of consciousness’ neatly articulates in anticipation what was to become Bourdieu’s insistence that intellectual endeavour has to be understood as grounded in practice. His view that we have to change our usual notion of necessity and contingency because human existence is ‘the transformation of contingency into necessity’ is one that was fundamental to Bourdieu’s attitude towards history and social change. Bourdieu shared Merleau-Ponty’s opposition to Sartre as expressed by the phrase: ‘the world is already constituted, but also never completely constituted’, which he constantly endorsed in what is known as his ‘soft determinism’. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty’s statement that Marxism has become a ‘secondary truth’ accurately expresses the view which Bourdieu adopted when analysing the relationship between social ‘conditions’ and ‘positions’. Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the transformative influence on Paul Nizan of his experience of colonialism is uncannily prescient in respect of Bourdieu, and, finally, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical resistance to what he regarded as Gurwitsch’s ‘intellectualist’ concept of the ‘field’ of consciousness points the way towards Bourdieu’s attempt to deploy it to understand the processes by which fields become ‘embodied’ in societies.

I do not try to argue in any detail that Bourdieu was specifically ‘influenced’ by the thought of Schutz, Gurwitsch or Merleau-Ponty. It was not a matter of influence so much as that Bourdieu embodied the tensions that are apparent in the thinking of the three antecedents. The purpose of this Part is to examine the way in which Bourdieu assimilated the philosophy which he was taught, integrating it with his primary experiences, in such a way as to reconcile intellect and experience in a form of social science pursued as a mode of action rather than in a philosophical position held in detachment.

5
The 1950s

Early career

In this chapter I explore the beginnings of Bourdieu's career. It was, perhaps, his enforced period of military service in Algeria which extinguished any aspiration to become a philosopher which may have lingered after his time at the École Normale Supérieure. What he saw in Algeria and how he saw it crystallized the awareness of the tension between familial and scholarly experience which he had already sensed in his youth. His time in Algeria enabled him to recognize the abyss between the way in which indigenous culture operated intrinsically and the way in which this was interpreted in terms of their own rational criteria by observing anthropologists.

Pierre Bourdieu was born on 1 August 1930 in Denguin in the Béarn region of the French Pyrénées-Atlantiques, not far from the Spanish border. He went to the local elementary school before passing to the lycée Louis Barthou in Pau, which he attended as a boarder from 1941 to 1947. He passed an entrance examination to attend the lycée Louis-Le-Grand in Paris which was one of the principal schools for students aspiring to enter the École Normale Supérieure. He passed the concours for the École and entered in 1951. He completed there a Diplôme d’études supérieures [diploma of higher study] under the supervision of Henri Gouhier. He secured his agrégation at the first attempt (Lescourret, 2008, 62). He graduated at the end of 1953. Deciding not to remain at the École for a further year of research, he took up a post as Professor of Philosophy at the lycée Théodore-de-Bainville in Moulins in the Bourbonnais. During this period he registered to undertake doctoral research under the supervision of Georges Canguilhem but, after only a year and a month teaching in Moulins, he was called up for military service in Algeria and was never able to pursue his doctoral project.

Pierre Bourdieu was twenty-five years old when he set foot in Algeria, in October 1955 (Bourdieu, ed. Yacine, 2013). He was posted to an air force unit of the military staff of the French administration, based in the Chéliff valley, 150 kilometres west of Algiers. In the Spring of 1956, he was drafted into the ‘cabinet’ of the Resident Minister in Algeria, Robert Lacoste. This enabled him to work with the Service de Documentation et d’Information of the Gouvernement Général, in Algiers. It was here that Bourdieu participated in the preparation of two reports which were published in 1959 in a publication of the Secrétariat social entitled Le sous-développement en Algérie [under-development in Algeria] (collected in Bourdieu, ed. Yacine, 2013, 72–82 and 39–51). It was here also that he was charged with the task of undertaking enquiries¹ for ARDES (Association pour la recherche démographique économique et sociale) [the Association for Demographic, Economic and Social Research], supplementing sociologically the work of statisticians from INSEE (Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques) [National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies]. He was demobilized at the end of 1957 after thirty months of military service (Lescourret, 2008, 73). He then secured a post teaching sociology in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Algiers, which he held from 1958 to 1960. On the eve of the ‘putsch of the colonels’ (22 April 1960), Raymond Aron enabled Bourdieu to leave Algeria and come to Paris to become secretary to the research group which he had recently established as the Centre européenne d’histoire sociologique [the European Centre for Sociological History]. It seems that Bourdieu carried out further fieldwork research in Algeria between June and September 1960, before taking up his post in Aron's Centre. Jean-Claude Passeron was called to Paris by Aron at the same time to be his assistant. Bourdieu renewed the slight acquaintance which he had had with Passeron when both were students at the École Normale Supérieure. Thrown together by Aron's patronage, they made a ‘contract of objectives’ to be fulfilled together.² Bourdieu taught the sociology of religion at the Sorbonne (Lescourret, 2008, 155) before, retaining his role in Aron's research Centre, he was appointed maître de conférences at the University of Lille in 1961. At Lille he taught the social history of sociological theories (Lescourret, 2008, 167) and, in the second year, the sociology of religion, which included consideration of Weber on religion (Lescourret, 2008, 168). During the first few years of the 1960s, Bourdieu published books and articles which followed from his work in Algeria and he also managed projects within Aron's Centre for which he partly secured collaboration with staff and students at Lille. These were projects on students, photography, museums/art galleries and language, which were reflected in collaborative publications. In 1964 he accepted a position in the VIth section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, which was to become the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in 1975. In 1964 he also became Co-director of Aron's Centre, which was now called the Centre de Sociologie Européenne (CSE).

Bourdieu gave an account of his studies at the École in response to Axel Honneth's questions in an interview of April 1985. There are three key passages. These are Bourdieu's words. First: ‘When I was a student in the fifties, phenomenology, in its existentialist variety, was at its peak, and I had read Being and Nothingness very early on, and then Merleau-Ponty and Husserl’ (Bourdieu, 1990c, 3). Secondly, Bourdieu stated that he followed the classes outside the École of Éric Weill, Alexandre Koyré and Martial Guéroult, and he commented that it was ‘pretty much thanks to them and to what they represented – a tradition of the history of the sciences and of rigorous philosophy (and thanks also to my reading of Husserl, who was still little translated in those days) – 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’ (Bourdieu, 1990c, 4). Bourdieu mentioned next that he had regarded Georges Canguilhem and Jules Vuillemin as ‘real “exemplary prophets” in Weber's sense’, but the third passage I want to emphasize is the response Bourdieu gave when Honneth pushed him as to whether he had ever been interested in existentialism. Bourdieu replied:

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 was later the case with Schütz – in my efforts to analyse the ordinary experience of the social. But I never really got into the existentialist mood. Merleau-Ponty was something different, at least in my view. (Bourdieu, 1990c, 5)

These passages are richly suggestive. Bourdieu was making explicit that he was influenced by the socio-historical orientation of contemporary French philosophers of science and, equally, was familiar with phenomenological discussions of time without adhering to an existentialist position. For the purposes of this book, Bourdieu's brief allusion to the distinctive feature of Merleau-Ponty's work is significant.

Texts

Diplôme d’études supérieures and proposed thèse d’état

We know precisely from Bourdieu's comment in his interview very late in life with Yvette Delsaut that he submitted for his Diplôme d’études supérieures in 1954 a ‘translation, prefaced and with notes and comments’ (Delsaut and Rivière eds, 2002, 192) of Leibniz's Animadversiones in partem generalem Principiorum Cartesianorum [Critical remarks Concerning the general part of Descartes’ Principles] under the supervision of Henri Gouhier.

Studying the response of one key Western European rationalist to another in relation to epistemological issues, Bourdieu must have appreciated in general terms that ‘Leibniz stood on the interface between the holistic and vitalist world-view of the Renaissance, and the atomistic and mechanistic materialism that was to dominate the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ (Ross, 1984, 1–2), or between scholastic a priorism and scientific empiricism. He would have known of Leibniz's inclination to search for a universal language or logic and to suppose that mathematics might constitute the basis for these universals.

Concentration on Leibniz's Animadversiones would have been influential in more specific ways. I highlight five main points.

First, Descartes's first proposition in the first part, ‘On the Principles of Human Knowledge’, of his Principia, was the famous emphasis of methodological doubt: ‘In the search after truth, one must, once in a lifetime and as far as possible, doubt everything’ (Schrecker and Schrecker, eds, 1965, 22). Leibniz argued, in opposition, that this supposed a distinction between truth and falsehood which is too absolute and wrongly dependent on ‘doubt’ rather than ratiocination: ‘The degree of assent or dissent which any proposition deserves must be considered; or still more simply, for every proposition the reasons must be examined’ (Schrecker and Schrecker, eds, 1965, 22). Bourdieu was to be sympathetic to this response when, later, he recommended to sociologists that they should follow Bachelard's injunction that hypotheses ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I Origins
• II Pierre Bourdieu. Evolution of an intellectual social project
• Postscript
• References
• Index