ABSTRACT
It is a great pity that the work of perhaps the two most creative sociologists of education of the last 50 years, Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu, should have been marred by what seems to have been a professional animus, with references to and pot shots at one another running through their work. Beyond this shadow boxing, the work of each moved round that of the other, never resulting in the kind of engagement that might have led to a theore tical supersession that would have strengthened the common endeavour of sociology, a supersession of the kind that they both argued for in their late work, as I will show below. Despite early fruitful relations – Bourdieu arranged for the French trans lation and publication of the 1971 “Social Class, Language and Socialization” paper in the series he edited for Editions de Minuit, Le Sens Commun, as Bern stein (2000, p. 177) reminds us – the sniping will be what most people will remember. Bourdieu (1991, p. 53) famously accused Bernstein of “fetishiz ing” “legitimate language” (the elaborated code) by not relating it to “the social conditions of its production and reproduction”, a canard Bernstein is moved to deal with twice (2000, pp. 122 and 177). Bernstein returned the compliment by repeatedly characterizing Bourdieu’s oeuvre (starting in Bernstein, 1990) as dealing only with “relations to” (meaning, the social relations between actors) and unable to deal with “relations within” (the social relations of symbolic forms), a lack Bernstein himself only addressed with respect to knowledge in his last work. For all that, they at times used remarkably similar theoretical terms: they both used the concept of “field” (though Bernstein later used the term “arena” without significant change of meaning); they both spoke of “recontextualizing”; and “code” and “habitus”, in the end, do the same conceptual work. There is also a deeper consilience in the careers of these two peerless neo Durkheimians: they both began with the same problematique, attempting to account for the complicity between symbolic and social formations, and they both ended up with a deep concern for the malaise in sociology in general, and in sociology of education in particular. It is this joint late
concern that is a major focus of this chapter. In order to understand the roots of this malaise, two key fault lines in science and culture will first be examined.
