ABSTRACT
At first sight, what is at the core of political agents’ behaviour is their deep familiarity with the field in which they compete with each other, a very natural relationship on the basis of which they deploy the calculations and strategies that are reflected in practices and actions aligned with the logic of the political space. That is largely true, providing we specify the mechanism that generates strategies and practices or, in other words, a set of actions that are not explained by the agents’ astuteness or genius or by the sophistication of their rationality, whose lack of realism is seen so well in more mathematicised versions of rational choice. Or, to state the argument I will develop in this chapter even more clearly: the explanation for the actions of the field’s agents lies not in political stimuli or reasons (even though they do fulfil a function) but in social rationalities. In order to discern and understand the impact of these rationalities, agents’ dispositional equipment in relation to conditions in the field must be subjected to the scrutiny of sociology. It is precisely here that we see with clarity the research avenue proposed by Bourdieu that is also the leitmotif of this book: “to think about politics without thinking politically”. It is this dispositional and cognitive equipment, the true matrix of the generation of practices or, in other words, the habitus of the professional political agent, to which this chapter is devoted.
