eric hobsbawm

PIERRE BOURDIEU
Critical Sociology and Social History

et me start with a little story about intellectual exchange,

which Bourdieu would have liked.1 As we know, Wittgenstein
entirely changed the orientation of his philosophy after 1929,
principally as a result of the criticisms of the Italian economist
Piero Sraffa, with whom he liked to walk and talk at Trinity College,
Cambridge. One day, when Wittgenstein was putting forth the argument that a proposition and what it describes must have the same
logical multiplicity, Sraffa replied with a Neapolitan gesture of scepticism or contempt, brushing his fingertips up and outward from his
chin: What is the logical form of this? Clearly, these conversations were
of the highest importance for Wittgenstein, who said he owed to Sraffa
an anthropological method of tackling philosophical problems; in other
words, the realization that social rules and conventions contribute to the
sense of our words and gestures.
As for Sraffa, he was far from according the same importance to his
exchanges with Wittgenstein, as he told his friend and student Amartya
Sen (also a friend of Bourdieu).2 In his view, the argument he had
used that day was rather obvious. Perhaps, but it was only obvious for
someone already acquainted with the anthropological approach to philosophy practiced in the intellectual circles of the Italian left in which
Sraffa was active, and where he had got to know Antonio Gramsci, a
close friend from the days of Ordine Nuovo until his death. If I start with
this story, it is not just because Gramscis preoccupations overlapped
to such a large extent with those of Bourdieu, albeit in a rather different way and in an Italian intellectual context, not a French one; its also
because it illustrates the cultural subjectivity inherent in all intellectual
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exchange. When we read an author, we set off in search of our own

points of interest, not theirs. Thus when non-French historians read
Bourdieus workwhich flows to such an enormous extent from his
intellectual context, that of post-war Franceits not his thought and
its development theyre considering, but their own. Not that its a dialogue of the deafI think I understand what Bourdieu is sayingbut
rather a case of parallel soliloquies, which sometimes seem to coincide.
I would ask you to bear this in mind if my reading of Bourdieu seems
partial or unfounded.
In the light of this initial warning, I will pose a simple question: what
has Bourdieu contributed, and what can he contribute, to the work of
contemporary historians? Whats most striking, to begin with, is the
central place his work accords to both history and interdisciplinarity. In
the hundredth issue of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, a special
number that Bourdieu saw as the reaffirmation of a project, five of the
nine articles are by historians or devoted to historical subjects; and six,
we may note in passing, are by foreign authors. Indeed, a quick glance
at the journal confirms that in Bourdieus last decade, the Actes turned
increasingly towards historical enquiry. Bourdieu had been accustomed
to working with historians ever since Braudel had welcomed him to
his Maison des Sciences de lHomme; in a us-German survey, he is
cited alongside Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Peter Laslett and
Maurice Godelier in a list of contemporary French and English historians, Marxist or otherwise, with an interest in anthropology.3 He took part
in Clemens Hellers fascinating international gatherings, the Round
Tables on Social History, and published a commentary on our debate
on the history of strikes.4 I vividly recall our conversations in the late
seventies on the need for a history of sporta topic as dear to the editorial committee of the Actes de la recherche as to Bourdieu himself. In
short, Bourdieu was perfectly at ease with historians, or at least with
some of them.
This paper was originally delivered at the Collge de France in June 2003, and
published in Jacques Bouveresse and Daniel Roche, eds, La libert par la connaissance: Pierre Bourdieu (19302000), Paris 2004. Reprinted here by kind permission.
2
Amartya Sen, Sraffa, Wittgenstein and Gramsci, Journal of Economic Literature,
vol. 41, no. 4, December 2003.
3
Georg Iggers, Neue Geschichtswissenschaft: Vom Historismus zur Historischen
Sozialwissenschaft, Munich 1978.
4
In the collection Sociology in Question, London 1993.
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And yet, he chose to become not a historian but a philosopher-turnedsociologist. In his most important writings, he refers much less to
historians than to philosophers, ethnographers and social anthropologists, and cites even fewerGeorges Duby, almost alone among his
French contemporaries. There are eminent historians whose names
are never mentioned, and Michelet is specifically rejected. Readers of
Homo Academicus (1984) know how he distrusted the sort of history
practiced at the higher levels of the French system. Despite his gratitude to Braudel, whose support was unqualified, he had no sympathy
for the longue dure approach of the Annales historians.5 He often noted
their lack of interest in a historical analysis of the concepts used in the
analysis of the past, in a reflexive use of history.6 The reproach is not
entirely just, especially to the Germansone thinks of the encyclopaedic
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffebut it is true that historians, apart from historians of ideas, show little interest in philosophy. Nor do philosophers
practice much history. In this respect, Hume in the eighteenth century,
and Croce and his school in the twentieth, are the exceptions that prove
the rule, though their historical works are not much read today.
Nevertheless, the past has a central stake in Bourdieus work since it
constitutes the soil in which the presents roots are plunged, forming
the basis for our capacity to understand our own times and to act upon
them. For my own part, like many historians, I have always admired
Bourdieu and have often been inspired by him. Had he wanted, he could
have been a great historian himself, which is manifestly not the case with
Foucault, Althusser or Derrida, to mention only the French thinkers best
known abroad. Bourdieu had the historians passion for the concrete,
the specific, the singular; he had curiosity and a gift for observing things
from a distancea capability that good anthropologists share with good
historians. Braudel liked to say: Historians are never on holiday. Each
time I take a train, I learn something. Bourdieu would have agreed.
Only someone with a natural gift for social history could have discerned
this characteristic of rural society:
The relative frequency of proverbs, prohibitions, sayings and regulated
rites declines as one moves from practices tied to agricultural activity, or
Pierre Bourdieu, Choses Dites, Paris 1987, pp. 556.
Pierre Bourdieu with Loc Wacquant, Rponses: Pour une anthropologie rflexive,
Paris 1992, p. 70.
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directly associated with it, . . . towards the divisions of the day, or moments
of human life, not to speak of domains apparently abandoned to chance,
such as the internal organization of the household, parts of the body, colours or animals.7

As an observer he was both sensitive to and fascinated by all that went

on below the surface of daily life in his country, the unspoken and unrecorded assumptions of contemporary French existence, the symptoms
of the nations state of health.
But what questions did Bourdieu pose on the subject of history? Are
they the same as those asked by social historians? Yes and no. I think
history had a double function for him. It was, first of all, the principal
tool of that reflexive criticism through which thinkers could become
aware of the specificitynot to say the subjectivityof the viewpoint of
any observer of society, and of any discipline claiming to be a social science. Every researcher who tries to understand the social world does so
on the basis of what Bourdieu calls objectivist presuppositions, the only
ones that allow us to judge the veracity of our observations, to legitimate
our methodology, to justify our generalizations. These presuppositions
took on a particular importance in the eyes of a sociologist like Bourdieu,
for whom scientific theory reveals itself only in the empirical work in
which it is realized.8 At the same time, ever since Marxthe Marx who
refused to think of himself as a Marxist and who invented the sociology of knowledgeit has been clear that the path towards the reality we
are seeking to understand passes inevitably through the dense and dark
forest of the assumptions and desires that the researcher carries with
him. We approach our work not as pure minds but as men and women
educated in a particular context, in such and such a society, in a specific
part of the globe, at a given moment in history. This is especially true for
sociology, at least if we think, as Bourdieu did, that its object of study is
fields of strugglenot only the fields of class struggle, but the fields of
struggle of scientific thought.
These characteristics are as much personal as social, even if, for Bourdieu,
the socialized bodymeaning the individual or the personshould
not be understood in opposition to society, but as one of its forms of
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, Cambridge 1990, p. 200. Translations modified here and in what follows.
8
Rponses, p. 136.
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existence.9 He knew that the purely private person should never be lost
sight of. That is why, as he wrote himself, this sort of self-analysis plays
a part in the conditions of development of my thinking. If I can say what
I say today, it is undoubtedly because Ive never stopped using sociology
against my social determinants and limitations; and used it above all
to transform the moods, sympathies and intellectual antipathies which
are, I think, so important in intellectual choices.10 Reflexive autobiography constituted a necessary part of Bourdieus thinking and his writings,
which were not a closed corpus but rather an incessant dialogue
sometimes repetitive, but always in development and unendingwith
his times. For him, history was precisely what allowed us to overcome
these obstacles. It is in discovering its historicity that reason gains the
means to escape historyThere is a history of reason; that doesnt
mean that reason can be reduced to its history, but there are historical
conditions for the social emergence of communication which make possible the production of truth.11
However, history is not only the gate one must enter to reach reality: it is
a central element of reality itself. I endeavour to show that what we call
the social is history through and through. History is registered in things,
in institutionsmachines, instruments, laws, scientific theoriesbut
also in bodies. My whole endeavour is an attempt to discover history where its hidden itself best, in peoples minds and in the folds
of their bodies. The unconscious is history. Thats true, for instance,
of the categories of thought and perception that we spontaneously
apply to the social world.12 Bourdieu appeals for a structural history,
which would reveal each successive state of the examined structure as
being at once the product of past struggles to maintain and transform
the said structure, and the principle of the transformations that flow
from it, through the contradictions, tensions and power relations by
which its constituted.13
Through his concept of fields (champs), Bourdieu himself hoped to do
away with the opposition between reproduction and transformation, static
and dynamic, or structure and history.14 As a historian of social transformations, I am only partly convinced. Certainly Bourdieus model helps
us to understand the upsurge of purely historical events, such as the
Sociology in Question, p. 15.
Choses Dites, pp. 36, 434.
13
Rponses, p. 68.

Choses Dites, p. 37.

Sociology in Question, p. 46.
14
Rponses, p. 67.

10

11

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crisis of May 1968, or any other great historical ruptureassuming that

the two great crises he has analysed in detail, May 1968 and the Paris revolution of 1848, can be considered great historical ruptures. This was an
important contribution to the international historical-sociological debate
on revolutions which, since the decline and fall of Soviet Communism,
has fallen into the background. The first years of the 21st century are not
a propitious moment for social revolutions, either in practice or in theory.
But one can no doubt predict a revival of interest in this type of historical
rupture and in Bourdieus studies of it.
Nevertheless, the model seems to me to display a rather narrow and
short-term conception of what constitutes a great historical rupture and
doesnt sufficiently question the relation between such rupturesin
the sense of the 19th and 20th centuries, his chief preoccupationand
the dynamics of the global process of the evolution and transformation
of human existence and activities on this planet. The central problem
of world history remainsand must remainthe processes that have
brought homo sapiens from the Palaeolithic era to the age of the internet. It is (so far) an extraordinary and highly complex achievement: a
particular species of mammals has succeeded in transforming itself by
transforming its environmentacting upon nature, in the terms of
Locke and Marx. This process has undergone such a brutal acceleration
over the course of the last century that we can observe its development
in real time, and confirm that it is running at the same pace as the
traditional history of political, cultural and artistic events. This extraordinary acceleration of social mutations since the middle of the 20th
century strikes me as being far and away the most striking historical
phenomenon of our epoch. Assuming that there are still historians in
the year 3000, their works will no doubt focus on this unprecedented
phenomenon, rather than the wars, massacres and revolutions of
the same period.
If the Bourdieusian model of fields of struggle is applicable to any
situation, along with his methods, it was conceived for other historical questions. Its pertinence is therefore limited. It was not designed
to explain either of the two central experiences of human history: the
Neolithic revolution, which saw hunter-gatherers turn themselves
into farmers, and the industrial revolution, which continues to
transform the planet.

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On the other hand, Bourdieus approach is absolutely indispensable for

understanding the operations of social reproduction, including the reproduction of social systems that incorporate inequalitythat is to say, the
quasi-totality of such systems. This thinking is most fully developed in
the remarkable Logic of Practice, in my view the central pillar of his oeuvre. It is in this work that we can best comprehend Bourdieus extremely
fertile concept of habitus, which unifies human structures and activities
by means of practice, in a given world: the agent as both the product of
society and of the past, and as subjectively pursuing strategies.15 I cannot imagine a historian who has ever taken an interest in pre-capitalist
societies, especially peasant societies, who would not immediately recognize the extraordinary perceptiveness of everything Bourdieu says about
them. Anyone studying the functions of customary law or jurisprudence
in such societies will recognize the suppleness with which general
principles are adjusted to particular persons, circumstances and social
relationships: Habitus is bound up with the flux, the wave.16 Bourdieus
acute powers of observation allowed him to recognize its limits in critical
and dangerous situations and therefore the necessity for a formalization
or codification of procedures: what he calls the peculiar virtue of form.
If it is easy to recognize all this in pre-industrial societies, it is Bourdieus
enormous merit to have recognized the persistent strength of practices
shaped by habitus in contemporary capitalist societies. This provides him
with an additional justification for criticizing theories of rational choice.
If he were alive today, he would have been amused to learn that an eminent mathematician, an expert in calculating the probabilities of risk,
recently told the American Academy how he grappled with the choice of
whether to move from Stanford to Harvard. He consulted a friend about
the problem. But you are an eminent decision theorist, said the friend,
Why not apply decision theory? To which the mathematician repliedI
cite from his textCome on, Sandy, this is serious!17
Habitus thus occupies the space between structures and human activity, between conscious action and historical determination; in Marxist
See especially Rponses, pp. 1145. To speak of habitus is to assume that the
individualeven the personal, the subjectiveis social, collective. Habitus is a
socialized subjectivity. (Reponses, p. 101).
16
Choses Dites, Paris 1987, p. 96.
17
Persi Diaconis, The Problem of Thinking Too Much, Bulletin of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 56, no. 3, Spring 2003.
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terms, it is what joins base and superstructure. It offers a concrete

answer to the question: what is actually happening whenin Marxs
phrasemen make their own history, but not of their own free will; not
under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given
and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.
Indeed, the whole problem springs from this. The constitutive elements
of the habitus favour reproduction, not change. These are the innumerable strategies of reproduction, at the same time independentto the
point of conflictand orchestrated by all the agencies involved, which
continually contribute to the reproduction of the social structure, albeit
with risks and failures issuing from the inherent contradictions, conflicts and competition between the agents engaged in it.18 The problem
of profound, long-term historical changes is as follows: how could they
have been realised by men and women who, up until the 18th century
at least, had for the most part lived according to modalities designed to
prevent any major change? Nevertheless, such transformations did take
place. How? In my view, Bourdieu does not have a convincing answer.
What he shows very well, on the other hand, is that in a society undergoing constant mutations at an accelerated rhythm, the majority of
human beings at the start of the 21st century are in the same position
as the Kabyles in the 1950s. We have all been hurled into a world in
which work and human relations have ceased to be the simple occupation conforming to the traditional division of tasks or to the traditional
exchange of services.19 Men and women must both adapt to and resist
the pulverization of the social world of personal and general relations in
which they were raised. Its precisely the type of society, dedicated to the
pursuit of happinessinseparable, in a capitalist market, from the purchase of goods and servicesby human beings conceived as individuals,
which inevitably generates the weight of the world that Bourdieu analysed in the 1990s.20
Why is it that those who areand know they areexploited and treated
as inferiors, so often accept their situation? This problem has long preoccupied those who want to change society for the better, and especially
those whose political commitment to the cause of a better world attracts
Rponses, p. 114.
Pierre Bourdieu, Les structures sociales de lconomie, Paris 2000, p. 15.
20
English edition: Pierre Bourdieu et al., The Weight of The World: Social Suffering in
Contemporary Society, Oxford 1999.
18

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them to the social sciences. As demonstrated by the superb chapter on

modes of domination in Logic of Practice, the theme has a central place in
Bourdieus work, and here his approach may seem superior to Gramscis,
who also tackled the question through his concept of hegemony.21
Nevertheless, Bourdieus terminology arouses certain reservations. I
would have preferred him not to use the ambiguous and misleading
term violence, as in symbolic violence. Though violence, the power
of physical coercion, is certainly present in every social order, overtly or
otherwise, Bourdieus use of the term diverts our attention away from
the real operations of the social world in which the relations of domination are made, unmade and remade in and by interactions between
people, and from the social formations mediated by the objective and
institutional mechanisms such as the self-regulating market in Karl
Polanyis sense.22 Violence does nothing to illuminate the processes of
fetishization by which Marxs commodities conceal the social relations
that underlie them, and by which relations of power and dependence
are no longer established directly between people; they are set up, in
objectivity, among institutions.23 These relations, as Bourdieu rightly
underscores, operate on a double plane, both social and economic.
But, as he knows, that doesnt constitute a power system, in the usual
sense of the term: it is the most implacable of all the forms of hidden
persuasionBourdieus wordsbecause it is exercised quite simply by
the order of things.24
Bourdieu shows here how this stability imposes itself in societies run
by those who wield power for their own ends and in their own interests, an analysis with many lessons for the contemporary world. He is
certainly not the first to show how ruling social elites are formed, and
how domination is exercised and transmitted, through various sources
of poweror, in his terms, capital. But few thinkers have conducted
the analysis with such brio, and none have seen as clearly as he did that
academic institutions have slowly become the principal sites for the manufacture and definition of social domination in contemporary societies,
including those whose systems of scholarly and cultural differentiation
are very different from the French one, to which, throughout his career,
he devoted some of his most ambitious works.
21
23

Logic of Practice.
Logic of Practice, p. 132.

22
24

Le sens pratique, p. 224.

Rponses, p. 143.

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How to draw together these disconnected remarks on Bourdieus importance for historians? He is a thinker whose work largely converges
with that of historians, which was not the case with Foucaultwho
trawled history for illustrations to serve a pre-constructed narrative
or the structuralists who, imitating Althusser, tried to eradicate from
their systems what historians call history. More than many social
theorists, Bourdieu was constantly aware of three essential points.
First, it is impossible to reduce the vast territory in which humans act
upon nature and themselveswhether or not they know what they are
doingto a series of little gardens, run by a formal system of rules.
Second, it is equally impossible not to systematize human relations,
both in social practice and in the theory which analyses it. Third, its
always possible to show that things could have been otherwise, that it
happened differently elsewhere, under other conditionsand, I would
add, in the spirit of Bourdieu, I trustthat they did happen differently
in the past and will be different again in the future; and we will analyse
things differently, too.
If I may conclude with a personal observation. As a Marxist historian
of the British school, what initially brought me close intellectually to
Bourdieu, a friend whom I admired, was discovering my own historical problematic in his work on the Kabyles, which he would later
develop and generalize in The Logic of Practice. At stake for him, as for
me, was to know how men and women live in a period of historical
transformation. It turned out that we were both asking similar questions about comparable phenomena at roughly the same moment. The
question Bourdieu was asking about the Kabyles in the 1950s was how
we could understand the conditions of the acquisition of the capitalist economic habitus among people formed in a pre-capitalist cosmos.
My first book, written at roughly the same time and devoted to rural
Mediterranean societies, set out from an almost identical question.
Again, like Bourdieu, I understood that the structuralist models of social
anthropology didnt suit mealthough our reasons were different.25
To me they seemed too static, in other words anti-historical, and thus
incapable of explaining the evolution of the human species over the last
10,000 years. Like Bourdieu, too, I had nothing but contempt for the
relativism of the postmodernists.
25

Choses dites, p. 19.

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I think I even recognized my own hopes as a historian in Bourdieus

hopes as a sociologist. The object of social science, he wrote in The Logic
of Practice, is a reality that encompasses all the struggles, individual and
collective, that aim at conserving or transforming reality, and in particular those whose goal is to impose the legitimate definition of reality and
whose specifically symbolic efficacy can help to conserve or subvert the
established order, that is to say, reality.26 In contrast to Bourdieu, however, I would doubt that the political action of intellectuals has many
immediate effects. But one of the reasons for my admiration for him, as
a man as much as a social thinker, is precisely that he maintainedto
the end of his tragically foreshortened lifehis belief in the capacity of
people like us to subvert the established order, that is to say, reality. That
is why he inspired so many people. Four years ago, he was awarded the
Ernst Bloch Prize, in memory of the utopian German philosopher who
formulated the principle of hope: man lives because he has faith in a
better future. So far as I know Bourdieu, who was in no sense a utopian,
never wrote on Bloch, but he knew perfectly well why he was singled
out for the prize. The principle of hope is an indestructible, indispensable aspect of human existence. And Bourdieu remained faithful to it,
because he wanted to change the world for the better. He did not believe
that it sufficed for philosophers to interpret it.

26

Logic of Practice, p. 141.