Politics and Sociology General Sociology, Volume 5

This is the fifth and final volume based on the lectures given by Pierre Bourdieu at the Collège de France in the early 1980s under the title ‘General Sociology’. In these lectures, Bourdieu sets out to define and defend sociology as an intellectual discipline, and in doing so he introduces and clarifies all the key concepts which have come to define his distinctive intellectual approach.

In this volume, Bourdieu develops his view of the social world as the site of a struggle for the legitimate vision of the world, a struggle in which the agents confronting one another are unequally armed.  The specific weapon used in these struggles is what Bourdieu calls symbolic capital, which is economic, cultural or social capital when perceived through suitable categories of perception.  All forms of power seek to impose their own categories of perception in a way that is both recognized and misrecognized.  This is how forms of power establish themselves as legitimate, because legitimacy is a force of recognition based on misrecognition, that is, recognized insofar as it prevents us from recognizing the arbitrariness at the source of its efficacy.

By rejecting the opposition between structuralist objectification and subjectivist constructivism, sociology, on Bourdieu’s account, can seek to grasp both the objective structure of social fields and the properly political strategies that agents produce in order to establish and impose their viewpoint.  And it can do this without forgetting that the whole world of social construction, whereby agents participate in producing social realities and inscribing them into the lasting objectivity of structures, is oriented by the perception they have of the social world, which depends on their position in these structures and their dispositions, themselves fashioned by the structures.

An ideal introduction to some of Bourdieu’s most important ideas, the five volumes of this series will be of great value to students and scholars who study and use Bourdieu’s work across the social sciences and humanities, and they will be of interest to general readers who want to know more about the work of one of the most important sociologists and social thinkers of the 20^th century. 

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) was one of the most influential sociologists and anthropologists of the late twentieth century. He was Professor of Sociology at the Collège de France and Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.  His many works include Outline of a Theory of Practice, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, The Rules of Art, The Logic of Practice and Pascalian Meditations.

Editorial Note


Acknowledgements



Lecture of 17 April 1986  

First session (lecture): recapitulation - Symbolic capital - Cognition and misrecognition - Symbolic power as fetish - Socialization through social structures - A political phenomenology of experience - Nostalgia for a lost paradise - From doxa to orthodoxy - Returning to symbolic power.
Second session (seminar): biography and social trajectory (1) - The prob-lem of the unity of the self - The unity of the self across different spaces - The self as foundation of the socially constituted individual - Curriculum vitae, cursus honorum, criminal record, school reports.



Lecture of 24 April 1986

First session (lecture): the fidès, a historical realization of symbolic capital - An ethnology of the unconscious - The examples of ethnicity and the designer label - The habitus as determination and as sensitivity.
Second session (seminar): biography and social trajectory (2) - Importing a literary break - Establishing consistency - The space of  biographical discourse - From the life story to the analysis of trajectories.




Lecture of 15 May 1986

First session (lecture): a dispositional solution - The independence of the habitus from the present - Prediction, protention and projection - Changing the habitus - Power - The petit-bourgeois relation to culture.
Second session (seminar): To the Lighthouse (1) - Fields as traps - A man-child - Men, oblates of the social world.



Lecture of 22 May 1986

First session (lecture): summary of previous lectures - Socialized individual and abstract individual - Habitus and the principle of choice - Mental structures and objective structures - The magical match of the body with the world - The false problem of responsibility - Coincidence of positions and dispositions - Amor fati.
Second session (seminar): To the Lighthouse (2) - Incorporating the politi-cal - Paternal power and the verdict effect - The somatization of social cri-ses - Metamorphosis and the founding experience of primordial power.




Lecture of 29 May 1986

First session (lecture): the division of labour in the production of representations - A theory of action - The conditions of rational decision - The problem as such does not exist - Deliberation as accident - A broader rationalism - Alternatives and the logic of the field.
 Second session (seminar): the field of power (1) - The field of power and differentiation of fields - The emergence of  universes ‘as such’ - Power over capital - Power and its legitimization.



Lecture of 5 June 1986

First session (lecture): eternal false problems - The alternative of mechanism and purposiveness, and the conditions of rationality - Scientific oppositions and political oppositions - The practical mastery of structures - Imposing the right point of view.
Second session (seminar): the field of power (2) - The example of the ‘capacities’ - Educational  system, numerus clausus and social reproduction - The search for stable forms of capital - The strategies of reproduction according to species of capital - Sociodicy and ideology



Lecture of 12 June 1986

First session (lecture): the space of positions and the space of stand-points - The representation of the social world at stake - A collective construction - A cognitive struggle - Making the implicit explicit - The specificity of the scientific field.
Second session (seminar): the field of power (3) - Boundaries of the fields and right of entry - The example of the literary field - Flow of capital and variations in the exchange rate - Establishing a new mode of reproduction - Maxwell’s demon.



Lecture of 19 June 1986

Practical struggles and struggles among theoreticians - The struggles of the professional explicators - Science of science and relativism.
Science as a social field - A rationalist relativism - The vulnerability of social science - The Gerschenkron effect - The problem of the existence of social classes - ‘Class’: a well-constructed fiction - Constructed classes and infra-representational classes - The constructivist phase.



Situating the Later Volumes of General Sociology in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu



Summary of Lectures of 1985-1986



Notes

Index