ABSTRACT
If the struggles that take place in the political field are for something as vague as “power” (exercised over what and whom? How? From where?) but which its agents nonetheless recognise, it is because relations within the field itself and its interactions with the profane agents around it are profoundly unequal and asymmetrical. Only a handful of selected individuals can aspire to dominate a space in which particular interests (those of its professional politicians, which often gives rise to the esprit de corps so brilliantly studied by Bourdieu (1996) in the case of France’s state elites) converge with the general interest, whose always controversial definition governs both the field’s operation and the social order it seeks to establish under rules of democratic competition. If only some agents can win power, others are necessarily relegated to the status of dominated agents. Does this imply that control of political power in the field itself produces asymmetries or are these the result of pre-existing inequalities originating in other spaces and places? Although both explanations are plausible and, indeed, coexist in practice, the former has in its favour the fact that agents are assumed to act politically, generating effects that are necessarily political. 1 It is, however, important to distinguish between the two explanations and, as the saying goes, separate the wheat from the chaff in order to explore not only the economic and social factors behind domination of the field but also the political factors (that is, those related to the field itself) that often reinforce and distort them by both causing and justifying the inequality that exists in the field. It is often forgotten that agents who enter the field and become professionalised there have cultural and social characteristics that set them apart from ordinary citizens, allowing them to be recognised by those agents already in the field as worthy of entry into it. It is, moreover, often forgotten that agents who have become professionalised in the field and have a lasting presence there also compete regularly among themselves for objectified posts and positions or, in other words, for positions of relative value 2 (hence the interest of understanding what is at stake in the social hierarchy of the field’s positions) whose changes in value and recognition have an historical explanation.
