ABSTRACT
The arena where political competition takes place is par excellence the political field. As a field, it is “a sub-space within the global space, defined by its relative autonomy [and] its structure, itself tied to a specific configuration of agents” (Lebaron and Le Roux 2013: 108). As known today, the political field is a socially recognisable space of relatively recent origin (if understood as disembedded from other spheres such as the religious sphere) and takes the form of a space of positions that have been objectified and hardened by history. Or, to be more precise, the political field as we know it is formed by positions that have historically been shaped by their occupants, resulting in social definitions of posts and positions whose manner of access and exercise have been codified while the relations that positions bear to each other form a hierarchy of precedence and subordination. It follows that the political field has not always existed, although this does not mean that politics cannot exist without a field: the difference is that, before the field was formed as a result of countless social transformations (such as the secularisation and increasing division of work), politics took place in a social space that lacked differentiation. When the political field was formed and became objectified in posts, positions, hierarchies, institutions and rules, this was confused with the construction of the parliamentary state. If it makes sense to talk about the history of the political field, it is, therefore, because it can throw light on six key dimensions:
the disembedding of what we know as the political space from other spaces, spheres or social fields;
the first objectivations of the positions it comprises (in one illustration of the logic of formation of the modern state, it was no accident that one of the first ministries to be created, before other more specialised ministries, was the War Ministry);
classes of positions once differentiation of different areas of the state has occurred as, for example, of the three powers (executive, legislature and judiciary whose separation and coordination are, in turn, the result of a specific history);
13hierarchies of positions in each of the separate and differentiated areas of the state;
the official order of state positions, regardless of the power involved, at ceremonies where the holders meet in all their majesty and the way they are seated or stand according to protocols that express hierarchical relations, not between the agents themselves but between classes of agents based on the importance assigned to the positions they occupy;
definitions and representations of the qualities required to hold a position in the political field and, particularly, a dominant one (consider all that is at stake in social definitions of prestige and, to paraphrase Boltanski and Thévenot (2006), the grandeur involved when a country’s president or its head of government is a woman, whether Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Angela Merkel in Germany or Dilma Rousseff in Brazil).
