Pointers on Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic

Politics
Loc Wacquant

We underestimate the properly political power to change social life by changing the
represention of social life, and by putting a modicum of imagination in power.
Pierre Bourdieu, Donner la parole aux gens sans parole (1977)

Pierre Bourdieu has rarely been read as a political sociologist or philosopher.1

And yet there is sense in which his oeuvre as well as much of his intellectual
activity represents a sustained, multiprong attempt to chisel a science of the social
conditions of possibility of democracy broadly defined as that social state
wherein everyone would possess both the inclination and the ability to take
matters political into their own hands and to detect the historical pitfalls and
possibilities of the struggles aimed at fostering its advance in different realms of
life. The epicentral place that the notion of symbolic power and issues of repre-
sentation, delegation, nomination, and (mis)recognition occupy in Bourdieus
work suggest that they constitute a major untapped store of concepts, theories,
and insights for rethinking the links between freedom, justice, and politics.
It is useful, to elucidate the vexed relation of Bourdieu to the question of demo-
cratic politics, to distinguish, if only for the sake of analytical clarity, between
three tightly intervoven elements: (1) the personal political views of the individ-
ual Pierre Bourdieu, which are pertinent insofar as they animate his scientific
practice and civic engagements; (2) politics as encountered in his sociological
writings, or how he treats the official institutions that compose the public sphere
of liberal democracies, parties and unions, parliaments and polls, the media and
the state, as objects of social scientific inquiry; and, last but not least, (3) the poli-
tics of Bourdieus works, that is, the role he assigns to science and intellectuals in
democratic battles, and the implications and uses of his thought in and for the
gamut of power struggles ranging from intimate gender battles on the home front
to the cross-continental mass mobilization against the neoliberal revolution
sweeping the globe today. A brief consideration of each of these elements helps
set the stage for the following special section, which brings together articles that
variously explicate theoretically and extend empirically Bourdieus conception of
democracy, and demonstrate the heuristic potency of his theory of symbolic
power as applied to organized politics.

Constellations Volume 11, No 1, 2004. Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
4 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004

The Personal Politics of Pierre Bourdieu

From early on in his youth, Bourdieu was consistenly a man of the left of the
gauche de gauche, as he famously put it in a biting criticism of the rightward
turn and renunciations of the Socialist Party in the mid-nineties that has since
become a standard phrase of French political language.2 He owed this proclivity
to his upbringing in a remote rural region of southwestern France where support
for socialist ideals ran strong amidst the ambiant conservatism, as did sympathy
for the frente popular during the Spanish Civil War and the Communist-led
Resistance to German occupation during World War II.3 His father was the son of
an itinerant sharecropper who, although he left school at fourteen, rose at mid-life
to become the postman of the tiny mountain village where Bourdieu spent his
childhood. He was a union supporter and voted far on the left. He instilled in little
Pierre an abiding respect for regular folks which in this isolated locale meant
small peasants, farm laborers, crafstmen, and shopkeepers and an acute sensi-
tivity to social (in)justice as well as admiration for the great figures of the French
republican left, Robespierre, Jean Jaurs, and Lon Blum, that had inspired the
civic vision of the Durkheimians a half-century earlier.4 The father had an anar-
chist and rebellious streak, which he also bequeathed to his only son.
This initial left propensity, buttressed by a strong regional culture that valor-
izes restiveness towards authority, was powerfully reinforced by Bourdieus
experience as an ethnic and class outsider in the affluent milieu of the elite high
school in Paris where he completed his secondary education on a government
scholarship and later at the Ecole normale suprieure at the Rue dUlm, where he
received his training in philosophy among the cream of Frances young minds in
the early fifties. There he gravitated towards schoolmates and teachers (such as
Georges Canguilhem) who, like him, were of lower social extraction and provin-
cial provenance, which correlates strongly with left political leanings. But, unlike
most students of his generation, Bourdieu did not join the Communist Party then
hegemonic on the intellectual scene.5 Indeed, he was repelled by Stalinist sectari-
anism and never in his life took up membership in an established political organ-
ization, party, union, or civic association. He had acquired during his stint as a
boarder in the public lyce of Pau a keen sense of the structural duplicity, even
hypocrisy, that warps official institutions. This initial anti-institutional disposi-
tion was confirmed by witnessing first-hand and studying sociologically the
horrors of French colonial policy during the Algerian war of independence,6 and
it only grew stronger over the ensuing decades.
Thus, Bourdieu always engaged with politics, but from a principled snipers
position, so to speak, anchored by a commitment to maintaining his independ-
ence from organized outfits, which he viewed as a sine qua non of scientific
work. In May 1981, when the Socialist Party rose to power for the first time under
Frances Fifth Republic, he was already staunchly in the left opposition to
Mitterrand his forewarnings about the latters corrupt ways and the rightward

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 Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics: Loc Wacquant 5

tilt of the Socialist Party were later to prove premonitory. Through the eighties,
he repeatedly defended the libertarian tradition of the Left against the govern-
mental Left willing to curtail debate, smother critique, and reduce policy options
in deference to the organizational necessities of party discipline and state man-
agement.7 In the nineties, he sought to put the competencies of social science at
the service of a decentralized network of democratic struggles spearheaded by a
new wave of progressive associations and coordinations bypassing traditional
agencies of social protest, such as the converging mobilizations of the sans
(those without: the jobless, homeless, and paperless migrants) and the emerging
transnational currents fighting the spread of neoliberal globalization. Some were
surprised by the vigor of his public involvement in worldly politics in the wake of
the publication of La Misre du monde8 and the wide-ranging social and political
reactions it triggered after the founding of the militant academic group Raisons
dagir in 1996 and the launching of a publishing house that year, rumor in Paris
even had it that Bourdieu was about to run for office. But, in reality, from his
youthful days as an apprentice anthropologist vivisecting the Algerian war to his
path-breaking sociology on the contribution of culture to the perpetuation of class
inequality at the start of the era of university expansion to his later public con-
demnations of the social wreckage left by policies of market deregulation and
social retrenchment, Bourdieu continually fused scientific inquiry and political
activism.9 Doing social science was always for him an indirect way of doing
politics: what changed over time is the dosage of those two elements and the
degree of scientific sublimation of his political pulsions.

Democratic Politics in Bourdieus Work

Aside from his analysis of the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria and conflicts over
education in the era of mass schooling, Pierre Bourdieus first writings trained
squarely on democratic politics date from the launching of the journal Actes de la
recherche en sciences sociales in 1975. They comprise a first cluster centered on
the ruling-class ideology, the culture-politics link, and the workings of the political
field.10
In a book-length article on The Production of Dominant Ideology published
two years after Giscard dEstaings entrance in the Elyse Palace, Bourdieu
mapped out the common places and neutral sites constitutive of the new
social philosophy of a reconverted conservatism painted in the soothing colors
of human progress, technoscientific reason, and measured change stamped by
optimistic evolutionism. He showed this new vision of and for power to be a
discourse without a subject whose primary function is to express and produce the
logical and moral integration of the dominant class.11 In Questions of Politics,
Bourdieu turned his sights toward the other end of the social spectrum to demon-
strate that the no responses of opinion polls and abstentions in elections have a
deeply political meaning: they reveal that the ability to proffer a properly political

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6 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004

expression in the public sphere, far from being universally given to all, is contin-
gent upon possessing the socially recognized competency and the sentiment of
being founded to do so.12 This argument was reworked in the chapter on Cul-
ture and Politics in Distinction, where Bourdieu revealed a homology between
the space of social positions and the space of position-takings in the political
arena, albeit at the cost of a systematic deformation, and spotlighted the opposi-
tion between two modalities of political expression: whereas among the working
class political judgments stem from the ethical springs of the class ethos in conti-
nuity with everyday reasoning, among the bourgeoisie they result from use of a
properly political cypher applied to the specialized stances of political debate.13
The radical discontinuity between ethos and logos, the practical mastery
and verbal mastery of the political game, made urgent the analysis of the func-
tioning of the microcosm of representative politics.14 In Political Represent-
ation: Towards a Theory of the Political Field, Bourdieu supplied both an
anatomy of the semi-autonomous world within which specialized agents and
institutions vie to offer politically effective and legitimate forms of perception
and expression to ordinary citizens reduced to the status of consumers, and one
of the first exemplifications of his distinctive concept of champ.15 Analysis of
the functioning of parties and parliaments suggests that the fundamental antinomy
of democratic politics is that the act of delegation, whereby professional politi-
cians are entrusted with the expression of the will of their constituents but pursue
strategies aimed chiefly at one another, is always pregnant with the possibility of
dispossession and even usurpation, and all the more so as the group represented is
more deprived of economic and cultural capital.16 It also discloses that

[t]he political field is one of the privileged sites for the exercise of the power of
representation or manifestation [in the sense of public demonstration tr.] that con-
tributes to making what existed in a practical state, tacitly or implicitly, exist fully,
that is, in the objectified state, in a form directly visible to all, public, published,
official, and thus authorized.17

The role of the political field as theater for the performative representation of
the social world leads to the second major node of Bourdieus political sociology,
namely, the issues of authoritative nomination and the symbolic fabrication of
collectives, be they families, classes, ethnic groups, regions, nations, or genders.18
Against the latent economism that leads us to underestimate the efficacy of this
dimension of every power that is symbolic power, Bourdieu asserts that social
science must encompass within the theory of the social world a theory of the
theory effect,19 that is, take full account of the fact that social reality is in good
measure the product of a collective work of cognitive construction that operates
in the ordinary encounters of everyday life as well as in the fields of cultural
production and in the clashes of visions and predictions of the properly political
struggle through which a definite conception of the pertinent divisions of the

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 Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics: Loc Wacquant 7

social world obtains.20 But, against approaches that absolutize language and
seek in the immanent features of communication the springs of its power to shape
reality, Bourdieu argues that the mystery of performative magic resolves itself in
the mystery of the ministery, that is, in the alchemy of representation (in the
different senses of the term) whereby the representative makes the group that
makes him.21 The efficacy of performative discourse is directly proportional to
the authority of the agent that enunciates it and to its degree of congruence with
the objective partitions of society: this Bourdieu demonstrates in Language and
Symbolic Power through a series of case studies in sociological pragmatics, on
religious ceremony, scholarly myth, philosophical argumentation, and the rites
of institution whereby salient social distinctions are absolutized by solemn acts
of categorization, overlaying them with the collective assent of the group.22
It is under this heading that one may put Bourdieus influential analysis of the
political uses and social effects of public opinion polls as a modality of expres-
sion of the will of the people, supplementing, complicating, and even rivaling
the two other major means of popular voice in liberal democracy, elections and
street demonstrations. In Public Opinion Does Not Exist, Bourdieu questions
the three tacit tenets at the basis of polls that everyone can and does have an
opinion, that all opinions are equal, and that there exists a prior consensus on the
questions worthy of being posed to argue that public opinion as presented in the
form of spot survey statistics in newspapers is a pure and simple artefact whose
function is to dissimulate the fact that the state of the opinion at a given moment
is a system of forces, of tensions.23 Polls are an instrument not of political
knowledge but of political action whose widespread use tends to devalue other
means of group-making, such as strikes, demonstrations, or the very elections
whose formally equalitarian aggregative logic they ostensibly mimic.24
A third major contribution of Bourdieu to the sociology and philosophy of
democratic politics clusters around his theory of the field of power and of the
state as the agency that successfully claims monopoly over the legitimate use
not only of material violence as Max Weber famously proposed but also of
symbolic violence. The notion of field of power was elaborated by Bourdieu in
the course of historical inquiries into the genesis and functioning of the artistic
field in nineteenth-century France and through a series of monographic studies of
top corporations, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, juridical authority, the
higher civil service, and elite schools that posed concretely the problem of the
conflict between different forms of power.25 To escape the substantialism and
misplaced realism inherent in the concept of ruling class, Bourdieu sketches the
constellation of interlinked institutions within which the holders of various
species of capital (economic, religious, legal, scientific, academic, artistic, etc.)
vie to impose the supremacy of the particular kind of power they wield.

This struggle for the imposition of the dominant principle of domination, which
leads at every moment to a state of equilibrium in the sharing of powers, that is to

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8 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004

say, to a division of the labor of domination (sometimes willed and conceived as

such, and explicitly negotiated), is also a struggle over the legitimate principle of
legitimation and, inseparably, over the legitimate mode of reproduction of the found-
ations of domination. It can take the form of actual confrontations (as with the
palace wars or armed struggles between temporal and spiritual power-holders) or
symbolic confrontations (such as those in the Middle Ages whose stake was the
precedence of oratores over bellatores, or the struggles that played out throughout
the nineteenth century, and continuing today, over the preeminence of merit over
heredity or talent).26

Anchored in the polar opposition between economic and cultural capital personi-
fied by the antagonism between the capitalist and the artist, the field of power
coalesced as a result of structural differentiation fostering the emergence of a plu-
rality of relatively autonomous fields, each governed by its own laws. This differ-
entiation opened up the space within which jurists attached to the dynastic state
gradually carved room for themselves and created the bureaucratic field, i.e.,
the set of impersonal public institutions officially devoted to serving the citizenry
and laying claim to authoritative nomination and classification27 as with the
granting of credentials (for positive sociodicy) and the bestowing of penal marks
(for negative sociodicy).
This reconceptualization of the state as the central bank of symbolic capital
guaranteeing all acts of authority situated at the barycenter of the field of power
allows Bourdieu to break with the unitary vision of the state as an organiz-
ational monolith and to link the internal divisions and struggles it harbors
exemplified by the running conflict between its right hand, entrusted with the
maintenance of the economic and legal order, and its left hand, charged with
the sustenance of the dispossessed and the provision of public goods28 to the
forces traversing social space. It also enables him to show that what tend to be
taken to be political clashes between the dominant and subordinate classes are
often collisions among different categories of the dominant (e.g., state managers
versus corporate owners) and between the different mode of reproduction of
capital that each favors (school-mediated acquisition versus hereditary transmis-
sion).29 And that the state does not exist only out there, in the guise of bureau-
cracies, authorities, and ceremonies: it also lives in here, ineffaceably engraved
in all of us in the form of the state-sanctioned mental categories acquired via
schooling through which we cognitively construct the social world, so that we
already consent to its dictates prior to committing any political act.30 Finally,
Bourdieu argues that the lengthening of the chain of legitimation attendant upon
the establishment of the bureaucratic state and the contention between differentiated
forms of capital introduces the possibility of diverting strategies of universal-
ization to put them at the service of progressive goals: as the division of labor of
domination grows more complex, as more competing agents (jurists, priests, sci-
entists, civil servant, politicians, etc.) invoke civic disinterestedness to advance
their specific interests, they create opportunities for the universal to advance.31

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 Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics: Loc Wacquant 9

Bourdieus tools for the analysis of democratic politics have been borrowed,
deployed, and amended in wide-ranging historical, anthropological, sociological,
and politological research.32 To stay in France, an important strand of political
science led by Bernard Lacroix, Daniel Gaxie, and Michel Offerl has dented the
establishment with the help of his theories and produced a wealth of original stud-
ies of the core institutions of representative democracy, parties, voting, polls, and
demonstrations.33 But they have also been put into action, by Bourdieu himself
and others, in the concrete struggles of the day.

Implications of Bourdieus Theories for Democratic Struggles

Bourdieu was always acutely aware of the implications of his research for
democratic politics and keen to disseminate its results to foster progressive trans-
formation. Over the decades, he wrote, lectured, and consulted extensively on the
practical teachings of his inquiries on colonial Algeria and rural change, educa-
tion and pedagogy, access to the arts and television, housing policy and market
deregulation, racism and discrimination, science and European integration,
among other topics.34 Indeed, along with the accumulation of scientific capital
that gave weight to his interventions, one of the springs of his increased activism
in the public sphere over time was a clearer realization of the applied ramifica-
tions of his analyses as the advances of his theories of habitus, field, and symbolic
power gave him greater purchase on the workings of the institutions he sought to
act upon or with.35 Bourdieu also continually revised and refocused his analyses
to capture extant political developments and the new threats directed at the demo-
cratic conquests of social movements. For instance, in the nineties the research
line initiated two decades earlier by the study of ruling-class ideology was
extended as well as thoroughly revamped, in particular by jettisoning the notion
of ideology altogether by the study of the planetary diffusion of the newspeak
of neoliberalism as the latest avatar of the cunning of imperialist reason.36
The effort to elucidate the transnational economy of symbolic exchanges so as to
foster a Realpolitik of reason at the European if not the global level37 was
complemented by the dissection of the Stranglehold of the Journalistic Field,
disclosing how the mainstream media feed the generalized drift towards com-
modification by reinforcing the weight of those favoring the commercial over
the pure, submission to market demand over the independent command of the
craft, in all the realms they touch, whether it be literature, art, philosophy,
science, television, or politics itself.38
The first practical implication of Bourdieus sociology of politics is to formu-
late anew the possible role of intellectuals in contemporary struggles. Based on a
historical reconstruction of the institutionalization of the category from Voltaire
to Zola to Sartre,39 Bourdieu argues that, far from being antinomic (as academic
professionalism would have it), intellectual autonomy and civic engagement
can and must be joined in a synergistic relationship such that scientists, writers,

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10 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004

and artists increase the efficacy of their political interventions in and through the
vigorous defense of their independence from economic and political powers.40
But to counter the rising influence of experts and think-tanks who put techno-
cratic science at the service of an increasingly rationalized mode of domination,
cultural producers must move beyond the model of the total intellectual incar-
nated by Jean-Paul Sartre and of the specific intellectual favored by Foucault to
create a collective intellectual through the pooling of the complementary com-
petencies of scientific analysis and creative communication, capable of bringing
the most rigorous products of research to bear on salient public debates in a
continuous and organized manner as Raisons dagir sought to do on the European
political scene.41 This collective intellectual has two urgent missions: the first is to
produce and disseminate instruments of defense against symbolic domination, and
in particular against the imposition of the prepackaged problematics of established
politics; the second is to contribute to the work of political invention necessary
to renew critical thought and to enable it to marry sociological realism with civic
utopianism.42
A second important teaching of Bourdieus inquiries for democratic practice is
that political action must target not only institutions (i.e., historical systems of
positions objectified in the public sphere) but also dispositions (schemata of per-
ception, appreciation, and action deposited inside social agents). For genuine and
lasting progressive change to occur, a politics of fields aimed at structured power
relations must of necessity be supplemented by a politics of habitus, paying close
attention to the social production and modalities of expression of political pro-
clivities. This is because

[s]ymbolic action cannot, by itself, and outside of any transformation of the condi-
tions of production and reinforcement of dispositions, extirpate embodied beliefs,
passions, and pulsions that remain thoroughly indifferent to the injunctions or
condemnations of humanistic universalism (itself also rooted in dispositions and
beliefs).43

Politics becomes a more complicated and more intimate affair once one realizes
that adherence to the existing order operates primarily, not through the mediation
of ideas and ideals, language games and ideological conviction, but through the
double naturalization of the social world resulting from its inscription in
things and in bodies, and through the silent and invisible agreement between
social structures and mental structures.44 This is particularly true of the passions
of the dominated habitus (from the standpoint of gender, culture, or language),
somatized social relation, law of the social body converted into the law of the
physical body, which for that very reason cannot be suspended by a mere
awakening of consciousness.45 Yet our societies, marked by the proliferation of
situations of disadjustment between habitus and world due to the generalization
of access to education and the spread of social insecurity, offer a fertile terrain for

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 Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics: Loc Wacquant 11

political interventions aimed at fracturing the doxic acceptance of the status quo
and fostering the collective realization of alternative historical futures: The
belief that such and such future, desired or feared, is possible, probable or inevit-
able, can, in certain conjunctures, mobilize around itself a whole group and thus
contribute to fostering or preventing the coming of that future. Politics consists
precisely in playing off and with this looseness in the correspondence between
subjective hopes and objective chances so as to introduce a margin of liberty
between them.46
Taking after Blaise Pascal, Bourdieus philosophical anthropology conceives
of humans as beings devoid of raison dtre, inhabited by the need for justifica-
tion that only the judgment of others can grant.47 This means that, far from being
a novel development linked to the rise of cultural diversity in advanced socie-
ties, the politics of recognition have always been with us: they are intrinsic to the
human condition. Issues of redistribution are inseparable from questions of digni-
tas insofar as social existence arises in and through distinction which necessarily
assigns to each a differential social status and worth. And because the symbolic
war of all against all never ends, there can be no political claim, no matter how
coarsely material, that does not enclose a demand for social acknowledgment.48
Here Bourdieu complicates current debates on deliberative democracy by sug-
gesting that the quest for cultural recognition, recently proposed by prominent
political philosophers as the aim of a progressive politics suited to the age of
increased migration and incipient ethnic fragmentation, is an expression of the
scholastic bias of academics who, projecting their hermeneutic relationship to
the social world, forget that every relation of meaning is also a relation of force:
culture is always an instrument of vision and di-vision, at once a product, a
weapon, and a stake of struggles for symbolic life and death and for this reason
it cannot be the means to resolve the running battle for access to recognized social
existence that everywhere defines and ranks humanity.49 So much to remind us
that the imperative of reflexivity, which is essential to Bourdieus conception of
social science, applies equally to politics: intellectuals must continually turn their
instruments of knowledge onto themselves in order to detect and control the
manifold ways in which their posture as lectores, and the interests and strategies
they pursue as independent cultural producers within the specific order of the
intellectual field, shapes their construction of the people and their interpretation
of the interests of citizens in liberal democracy.50
A final political implication of Bourdieus agonistic conception of the social
world, as suffused by relations of domination ultimately anchored in the necessar-
ily unequal distribution of symbolic capital and the inescapable dialectic of
distinction and pretention it activates, is that democracy is best conceived not as
an affirmative state of formal equality, equal capacity, or shared freedoms but
as a historical process of negation of social negation, a never-ending effort to
make social relations less arbitrary, institutions less unjust, distributions of
resources and options less imbalanced, recognition less scarce. And for this

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12 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004

Bourdieu supplies a general principle of political engagement: first to acknow-

ledge that the conditions of access to political expression are not universally
granted a priori to all but, on the contrary, that they are socially determined and
differentially allocated; and then to work to universalize the ability and the
propensity to act and think politically, that is, to universalize realistic means of
gaining access to that particular historical embodiment of the universal that is
democratic politics.

NOTES

1. With the exception of Germany and Latin America, where several collections of
Bourdieus dispersed essays on politics and intellectuals have fostered close readings of his views on
power and democracy (see, for Germany, the volume of original pieces edited by Uwe H. Bittling-
mayer, Jens Kastner, and Claudia Rademacher, Theorie als Kampf? Zur politischen Soziologie
Pierre Bourdieus (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 2002), and Russia, where Natalia Schmatko edited a
selection of Bourdieus articles entitled Sociology of Politics in 1993). In the Anglo-American world,
appropriations of Bourdieus political sociology have tended to bunch up on the empirical side, but
see George Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), Orville Lee, Cul-
ture and Democratic Theory: Toward a Theory of Symbolic Democracy, Constellations 5, no. 4
(December 1998): 43355, and Keith Topper, Not So Trifling Nuances: Pierre Bourdieu, Symbolic
Violence, and the Perversions of Democracy, Constellations 8, no. 1 (March 2001): 3056.
2. Bourdieu, Interventions, 19612001. Science sociale et action politique, ed. Franck
Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo (Marseilles & Montral: Agone, Comeau & Nadeau, 2002), 36164.
3. Bourdieu, Erinnerung ohne Gedanken, in Von Vergessen vom Gedenken, ed.
H.L. Arnold Sauzay and R. von Tadden (Gttingen: Wellstein, 1995), 4247.
4. See Bourdieu, Le Bal des clibataires. Crise de la socit paysanne en Barn (Paris: Seuil/
Points, 2002), for an ethnographic portrait and analysis of the social structure and contradictions of
his native Barn, and Durkheim, Lettres Marcel Mauss (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1998), for abundant testimony to the centrality of Republican socialism to the formation of the
French school of sociology.
5. Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity,
1990 [1987], rev. ed. 1994), 13.
6. Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad, Le Dracinement. La crise de lagriculture tradition-
nelle en Algrie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1964); Bourdieu, Interventions, 1742.
7. Ibid., 16569.
8. Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Cam-
bridge: Polity, 1999 [1993]).
9. This synergistic relation between scientific inquiry and political activism is demonstrated
by Poupeau and Discepolos article in this issue, but more so by a close reading of the volume of
Bourdieus collected public interventions from 1961 to 2001 they skillfully edited, Interventions.
10. In what follows, I signpost the main thematic nodes in Bourdieus treatment of democratic
politics, with references only to pivotal pieces, without tracing the numerous transversal queries that
tie them tightly together. All citations to Bourdieus texts are my translations from the French.
11. Bourdieu with Luc Boltanski, La production de lidologie dominante, Actes de la recherche
en sciences sociales 2/3 (June 1976): 4. Here Bourdieu formulated within a Durkheimian framework
an argument made famous later within the Marxist lineage by Nicholas Abercrombie, Bryan
S. Turner, and Stephen Hill in The Dominant Ideology Thesis (London: Routledge, 1984).
12. Bourdieu, Questions de politique, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 16 (June 1977): 64.
13. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1984 [1979]).

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 Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics: Loc Wacquant 13
14. Ibid., 537.
15. Bourdieu, Political Representation: Elements for a Theory of the Political Field, Lan-
guage and Symbolic Power, ed. and intr. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1991 [1982, this essay 1981]). It is not by happenstance that this article was sandwiched
between those on the scientific field and the religious field. For Bourdieu, these three universes are
similar in that they are based on a radical disjuncture between the profane and the specialists who
claim monopoly over the manipulation of three essential goods: scientific truth, spiritual salvation,
and civic virtue.
16. By a strange irony, the concentration of political capital is never so great . . . as in the case
of those parties that have for goal to struggle against the concentration of economic capital. Ibid.,
215.
17. Ibid., 235.
18. Bourdieu, Capital symbolique et classes sociales, LArc 72 (1978): 1319; Le mort saisit
le vif: les relations entre lhistoire incorpore et lhistoire rifie, Actes de la recherche en sciences
sociales 3233 (April-June 1980): 314; Language and Symbolic Power; Delegation and Political
Fetishism, Thesis Eleven 10/11 (November 1985 [1984]): 5670 (reprinted in In Other Words);
Masculine Domination (Cambridge: Polity, 2002 [1998]). An extension of Bourdieus germinal
essay on the family as the primordial political collective of modern society (The Family as Real-
ized Category. Theory, Culture, and Society 13, no. 3 (July 1996 [1993]): 926 (rep. in Practical
Reasons: On the Theory of Action (Cambridge: Polity, 1998 [1994]))) is Remi Lenoirs provocative
analysis of the historical forms of familialism since the Middle Ages, Gnalogie de la morale
familiale (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2003).
19. Bourdieu, Interventions, 102.
20. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 106.
21. Ibid. and The Mystery of the Ministry: From Particular Wills to the General Will [2001],
in this issue.
22. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 12021.
23. Bourdieu, Public Opinion Does Not Exist, in Communication and Class Struggle, ed.
A. Matelart and S. Siegelaub (New York: International General/IMMRC, 1979 [1971]), 224; see
also Opinion Polls: A Science without a Scientist, In Other Words [1985].
24. The incipient conflict of legitimacy between voting and polling, and their joint opposition
to street demonstration as a means of symbolic group-making, is analyzed at length by Patrick
Champagne, Faire lopinion. Le nouveau jeu politique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1990).
25. These studies were published between 1971 and 1996 and their main results are encapsu-
lated in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Artistic Field (Cambridge: Polity, 1996
[1992]), The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (Cambridge: Polity, 1996 [1989]),
and Bourdieus unpublished course from the early 1990s on the invention of the state at the Collge
de France.
26. Bourdieu, The State Nobility, 376.
27. Bourdieu, Rethinking the State: On the Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,
Sociological Theory 121 (March 1994 [1993]): 119 (reprinted in Practical Reasons).
28. Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World and Interventions, 24552.
29. Bourdieu, From the Kings House to the Reason of State: A Model of the Genesis of the
Bureaucratic Field [1997], in this issue.
30. The construction of the state goes hand in hand with the construction of a sort of shared
historical transcendental that, as a result of a protracted process of embodiment, becomes immanent
to all its subjects. Through the frameworks it imposes upon practices, the state institutes and
inculcates common symbolic forms of thought, statist forms of classification. . . . The state thereby
creates the conditions of an immediate orchestration of habitus that is itself the foundation of a
consensus on this set of shared self-evidences constitutive of common sense. Bourdieu, Pascalian
Meditations (Cambridge: Polity, 2000 [1997]), 175.
31. Bourdieu, The State Nobility, 55859.
32. For a sample from among the issues of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales published
in the past decade alone, see Politiques (9192, March 1992), Literature and Politics (111112,

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14 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004
March 1996), Violences (120, December 1997), and Votes (140, December 2001); and on the
state more specifically, The History of the State (116117, March 1997), Genesis of the Modern
State (118, June 1997), From Social State to Penal State (124, September 1998), and State Sci-
ence (133, June 2000). The varied uses of Bourdieus theory of the political field include David
Stark and Laszlo Bruszt on democratization and economic change in post-Soviet Eastern Europe
(Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998)), Raka Ray on womens movement in urban India (Fields of
Protest: Womens Movements in India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)), Robert
W. Hefner on Islam and democracy in Indonesia (Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in
Indonesia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)), Gil Eyal on the breakup of Czechoslovakia
(The Origins of Postcommunist Elites: From the Prague Spring to the Breakup of Czechoslovakia
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)), and Georgi Derluguian on nationalist rebellion
in Chechnya (Bourdieus Secret Admirer in the Caucasus (London: Verso, 2004)).
33. See, among influential books, Michel Offerl, Les Partis politiques (Paris: Presses Univer-
sitaires de France, 1987); Bernard Pudal, Prendre parti. Pour une sociologie historique du PCF
(Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1989); Bernard Lacroix and
Jacques Lagroye, eds., Le Prsident de la Rpublique (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des
Sciences Politiques, 1992); Daniel Gaxie, Le Cens cach. Ingalits culturelles et sgrgation poli-
tique (Paris: Seuil, 1978); Le Vote et la vertu. Comment les Franais sont devenus lecteurs (Paris:
Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1992); Loc Blondiaux, La Fabrique de
lopinion. Une histoire sociale des sondages (Paris: Seuil, 1998); Pierre Favre, ed., La Manifestation
(Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1990); Michel Dobry, Sociologie
des crises politiques (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1992); and
Erik Neveu, Sociologie des mouvements sociaux (Paris: Montchrestien, 1996). Consult also the
thematic section on Bourdieu and political science edited by Bertrand Voutrat, Dbat: propos de
Pierre Bourdieu, Revue Suisse de science politique 8, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 10150.
34. See esp. Bourdieu, Interventions.
35. This is particularly visible in the case of publishing and the media: Bourdieus sociology
of the fields of cultural production, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1994), was key to his successfully launching a publishing house, Raisons dagir Editions,
and to the efficacy of his critique of journalism (On Television was on the bestseller lists for months
due to the furious reactions of journalists against it, which made them active propagandists of an
analysis they deemed sacrilegeous).
36. Bourdieu and Wacquant, The Cunning of Imperialist Reason, Theory, Culture, and Society
16, no. 1 (February 1999 [1998]): 4157. See also the double issue of Actes de la recherche en
sciences sociales on that theme (12122, March 1998), and Yves Dezalay and Brian G. Garths
multidisciplinary study of the packaging and global export of US conceptions of rule of law and
civil society by philanthropic foundations and international agencies, Global Prescriptions: The
Production, Exportation, and Importation of a New Legal Orthodoxy (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2002).
37. Bourdieu, Les conditions sociales de la circulation des ides, Romanistische Zeitschrift fr
Literaturgeschichte 14, no. 1/2 (1990): 110; Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2
(London: Verso, 2003 [2001]); Interventions, 44350, 45775.
38. Bourdieu, On Television and Journalism (London: Pluto, 1998 [1996]).
39. For a historical dissection of the crystallization of the mental and social category of
intellectuel around the Dreyfus Affair and of the social roots of its endurance informed by the
theory of field, read Christophe Charle, Naissance des intellectuels (Paris: Minuit, 1990); on
Bourdieus reactivation of the Zola model, read Jean-Philippe Mathy, The Prophetic Exigency: Zola,
Bourdieu and the Memory of Dreyfusism, Contemporary French Civilization 24, no. 2 (Summer-Fall
2000): 32140.
40. Bourdieu The Corporatism of the Universal: The Role of Intellectuals in the Modern
World, Telos 81 (Fall 1989): 99110; The Rules of Art, 33948.
41. Poupeau and Discepolo, Scholarship with Commitment.

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 Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics: Loc Wacquant 15
42. Bourdieu, Propos sur le champ politique (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2000),
99107, Firing Back, 363.
43. Pascalian Meditations, 215.
44. Bourdieu, Le mort saisit le vif and Pascalian Meditations, 216.
45. It is this primacy of the unconsious consent to the injunctions of the social world via the
embodiment of extant relations of domination that led Bourdieu little by little to banish the use of
the word ideology (ibid., 216). The sociologist gives for illustration the incarnation of nationalism
and the mortal passions of all racisms (of ethnicity, gender, or class) which are no less strong
among the dominated than among the dominant (ibid, 21417). Yet the paradigm of the somatization
of symbolic violence for Bourdieu is masculine domination.
46. Ibid., 216, 27678.
47. Ibid., 28084.
48. Compare Bourdieus treatment of the question of justification and the symbolic effects
of capital (Practical Reasons, ch. 4 and Pascalian Meditations, 27988) with Charles Taylor and
Amy Gutmans Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1992), Seyla Benhabibs The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), and Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneths Redistribution
or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003).
49. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 83.
50. Bourdieu, In Other Words, 17884. Bourdieus critique of Habermass conception of
communicative action and ethics would seem to apply readily to political theorists of recognition
and advocates of multiculturalism; see Pascalian Meditations, 8088.

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