ABSTRACT
Pierre Bourdieu currently holds the chair in sociology at the Collège de France. His bibliography permits of no easy summary. It encompasses work on religion, capitalism, the symbolic organization of space and the structural determination of conceptions of time, modernization, language, education, aesthetics, the Algerian peasantry, and the French elite. Its topical variations nevertheless belie a more limited array of overarching interests and themes. Perhaps the most salient and persistent of those themes centers on sociocultural "reproduction" and especially on the means and modes of the reproduction of domination. Such a theme unites virtually all of Bourdieu's monographs currently available in English, from the Outline of a Theory of Practice (translated by R. Nice [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977]), through Distinction: A Social Critique of the judgement of Taste (translated by R. Nice [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984]) and Homo Academicus (translated by P. Collier [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988]), to The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public, coauthored by A. Darbel, with D. Schnapper (translated by C. Beattie and N. Merriman [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991]). An analysis of reproduction might at first sight seem to be the direct, if morally somewhat deflated, offspring of Durkheim's earlier analysis of solidarity. The analyst of reproduction might—and at more than merely first sight—seem a direct, if morally more beleaguered, offspring of Durkheimian functionalism. Bourdieu may well be a "neofunctionalist." But he resists following either Durkheimians or their structuralist successors in reducing society simply to its normative proscriptions and prescriptions. He resists following either in reducing culture simply to its most conventional expressions and collectively most recognizable representations. He accuses both such reductions of an "objectivism" that fails adequately to countenance the import either of the strictly historical particularity or of the dispositional regularity of human practices. In what follows, an excerpt from The Logic of Practice (translated by R. Nice [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990]), pp. 52–65, Bourdieu offers his most concise exposition to date of the conceptual foundations of a theory of action that might escape the shortcomings not simply of objectivism but also of its subjectivist antithesis. At the crux of that theory is the habitus: the socialized body; the dispositional core of the practitioner whose every virtue, subservient and rebellious, is a structural necessity and whose every compulsion, subservient and rebellious, is a structural virtue.
