ABSTRACT
Pierre Bourdieu has been the most important of French post-war social theorists and, arguably, of sociologists internationally. However, in going on to use Bourdieu for further research, we need to challenge an emerging sociological orthodoxy. This is that Bourdieu is a theorist only of reproduction, in other words, that he cannot deal with change. On this, Burawoy is typical of many others (Bura woy and von Holdt 2012). He claims that Bourdieu has an ‘over-socialized [theory] of man’, that he ‘points to the possibility of change but has no theory of change’, and that ‘[w]e should not compound the forcefulness and eternisation of the present by subscribing to unsubstantiated claims about the deep internalisation of the social structure’ (ibid.: 18). Similar judgments are made by Callinicos (2006), Archer (2007) and even Bourdieu’s former collaborator, Boltanski (2011). In contrast to these writers, I shall first very briefly sketch out a theory of social
transformation in Bourdieu’s work, stemming especially from his historical understanding of the importance of radical social critics or prophets (see also Fowler 2011). Second, I shall explore his 1989-1991 lectures, On the State, on ‘the invention under constraints’ of the nation-state and its ‘genesis of bureaucratic logic’ (Bourdieu 2014: 89). This series taken as a whole argues for the radical potential of the nation-state as a democratic instrument of social justice, despite such states’ recent role as the vehicles of neoliberal governance. Here I shall address the paradox he finds at the heart of the state. This is framed in terms reminiscent of the young Marx on Hegel – the tension between the State Nobility’s disinterested universalism and their sectional interests as a dominant class, not least their interests in their own family’s reproduction. But I shall also suggest – against the grain of Sayer’s interpretation (2010) – that these late works contain not merely a realist critical sociology but an Enlightenment theory of human potential. Third, and finally, I shall address the field of cultural produc - tion. I claim that this work on the State – despite his various studies of finance capitalism such as The Social Structures of the Economy (Bourdieu 2005a) and Acts of Resistance (Bourdieu 1998a) – never spelled out the full social impli - cations of the Welfare State, so that its current retrenchment is only sketchily charted in Bourdieu. The constrained space for the ‘Left Hand of the State’ entails further consequences beyond those already disastrous effects of which Bourdieu
was so aware. I refer to what he called the ‘second conservative revolution’: the assault on mass living conditions with the concerted ‘reforms’ of pensions, public housing and the law governing trade union action (Bourdieu 1998a: §8). Such a Welfare State retreat has already revealed major consequences for the literary and artistic fields and is likely to have much more damaging long-term effects. To exemplify this point, I shall discuss a group of Scottish writers born between 1934 and 1947. Contrary to the rule in capitalist modernity (Todd 1987) and to Bourdieu’s own expectations in The Rules of Art, they have come from the sub - ordinate classes and are thus, in his terms, ‘miraculous’ survivors (Bourdieu 1996b: 104-105). I argue that this has been due to distinctive enabling conditions in the post-war period, including the availability of public funding. By further buttressing Bourdieu with analyses of deepening social inequality, we can see that such developments are now jeopardised.
