Abstract
A critical review of Bourdieu’s theory of the state is developed here against the backdrop of both his wider theoretical project and empirical studies. Elaborating the concepts of symbolic capital, symbolic violence, and symbolic domination, the centrality that Bourdieu accords to symbolic forms is compared to benchmark Weberian accounts that start with the state monopoly of violence. Reviewing also some of the burgeoning secondary literature discussing his theory of the state, Bourdieu’s writings, which encompass various antinomies, are shown to vacillate between two distinct perspectives—a strong and a weak theory of the state. His rejection of the “physicalist” approaches of Marx, Elias, and Tilly is elaborated and subject to a counter-critique, particularly in relation to the notion of symbolic “violence.” Bourdieu’s account of the state is shown to be as much a political as theoretical intervention. His antagonism towards Marxist accounts in particular is shown to be rooted in a pragmatic interest in the role of the “left hand of the state” in progressive reform; and this perspective is traced back to the twin influences of Durkheim and Hegel, French republicanism, and in particular the potential of the state to express a universal interest. At the same time, compared with sophisticated Marxist and Weberian accounts and the work of Norbert Elias and Gramsci, Bourdieu’s theory is shown to be severely lacking in the way that he deals with violence and coercion. His “expanded materialism,” particularly with the “strong theory,” bends the stick too far and overplays the symbolic basis of consent. Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s insights with regard to the pervasive influences of state practices of classification, taxonomy, delegation, and naming are shown to have real utility with regard to focused empirical investigations of the state in modern societies.
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Notes
As Champagne et al. note: “It was only in 1984 in Homo Academicus, that Bourdieu actually used the word ‘state’, defining it in passing as ‘holder of the monopoly of symbolic violence.’ He then fully adopted it, even for the title of his book The State Nobility, published in 1989 to celebrate ‘differently’ the bicentenary of the French Revolution as well as in a series of texts analyzing the ‘science of the state,’ ‘state minds,’ or ‘state magic”’ (Champagne et al. 2014, p. 379).
Although he disagrees with this restricted functionalism this does not mean he does not see the state as fulfilling some of the functions that Marxists ascribe to it – such as the manufacture of consent.
This, for example, was a central question in the rather unfruitful debate between Milliband (1970, 1973) and Poulanzas (1969, p. 1976). Bourdieu writes: “Instead of asking whether the state is dependent or independent, you examine the historical genesis of a policy, how this happened, how a regulation, decision or a measure was arrived at, etc. You then discover right away that the academic Streit [dispute] between dependence and independence has no meaning, that it is impossible to give a response that is valid for all circumstances” (Bourdieu 2014, p. 112).
For Weber the state was able to claim a monopoly of legitimate violence with the aid of a regularized administrative staff as well as a paid army over a delimited territorial area. The modern state, as he famously noted, was a compulsory association that organized domination: “A compulsory political organization with continuous operations (politischer Anstaltsbetrieb) will be called a ‘state’ insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order” (Weber 1978, p. 54).
For Durkheim, the state was above all an “organ of social thought” elaborating definite representations for the collectivity: “the special organ whose responsibility it is to work out certain representations which hold good for the collectivity. These representations are distinguished from other collective representations by their higher degree of consciousness and reflection” (Durkheim 1996, p. 40). The state as a “social brain,” both partially constituted society’s sentiments and ideals, the moral order, and reflected the universal interests of those over whom it governed by promoting moral individualism.
“The social world doesn’t work in terms of consciousness, it works in terms of practices, mechanisms and so forth.... By using doxa we accept many things without knowing them, and that is what is called ideology.... We must move away from the Cartesian philosophy of the Marxist tradition towards a different philosophy in which agents are not aiming consciously towards things, or mistakenly guided by false representation. I think that is all wrong, and I don’t believe in it” Bourdieu and Eagleton (1995, p. 113).
“Relations of force are inseparable from relations of meaning and communication, the dominated are also people who know and acknowledge… The act of obedience presupposes an act of knowledge, which is at the same time an act of acknowledgement … the person who submits, who obeys, bends to an order or discipline, performs a cognitive action…. Acts of submission and obedience are cognitive acts, and as such they bring into play cognitive structures, categories of perception, patterns of perception, principles of vision and division, a whole series of things that the neo-Kantian tradition emphasizes” (Bourdieu 2014, p.164).
Bourdieu’s analysis of stages two and three is not dissimilar to Elias’s concept of “courtisation” and the consolidation of the absolutist state in France (2006).
Pierre Bourdieu, “For a corporatism of the universal,” in Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Cambridge: Polity Press 1996, pp. 337–348.
“Because the habitus is an endless capacity to engender products—thoughts, perceptions, expressions, actions—whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it secures is as remote from a creation of unpredicatable novelty as it is from a simple mechanical reproduction of the initial conditionings” (Bourdieu 1977, p. 95).
Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market, New York: The New Press 1999, p. 2. He later adds: “the state, in every country, is to some extent the trace in reality of social conquests,” ibid., p. 33.
For a similar view, see also David Swartz, Symbolic Power, Politics and Intellectuals: the Political Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; and Willem Schinkel, “The Sociologists and the State: An Assessment of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology,” British Journal of Sociology, volume 66, no. 2, 2015, pp. 215–235.
For Mosca (1939: p. 53) how groups were organized was crucial: “The power of any minority is irresistible as against each single individual in the majority, who stands alone before the totality of the organized minority”
In their analysis of the racialization of legal categories, Emigh, Riley, and Ahmed (2016) attempt to challenge Bourdieu amongst others, by even questioning the view that what is considered to be a central feature of state power—the creation of census categories—are in fact the product of the state. They argue instead that they are a product of an interaction between state and society. Census categories were already widespread in society before being taken up by the census.
There Bourdieu writes: “In a society in which overt violence, the violence of the usurer or the merciless master, meets with collective reprobation and is liable either to provoke a violent riposte from the victim or force him to flee (that is to say, in either case, in the absence of any other recourse, to provoke the annihilation of the very relationship which was intended to be exploited), symbolic violence the gentle, invisible form of violence, which is never recognized as such, and is not so much undergone as chosen, the violence of credit, confidence, obligation, personal loyalty, hospitality, gifts, gratitude, piety—in short, all the virtues honoured by the code of honour—cannot fail to be seen as the most economical mode of domination, i.e., the mode which best corresponds to the economy of the system” (1977, p. 192).
‘Symbolic capital a transformed and thereby disguised form of physical “economic” capital, produces its own proper effect inasmuch, and only inasmuch, as it conceals the fact that it originates in “material” forms of capital which are also, in the last analysis, the source of its effects Bourdieu (1977, p. 183).
‘Once one realizes that symbolic capital is always credit, in the widest sense of the word, i.e., a sort of advance which the group alone can grant those who give it the best material and symbolic guarantees, it can be seen that the exhibition of symbolic capital (which is always very expensive in economic terms) is one of the mechanisms which (no doubt universally) make capital go to capital (Bourdieu 1977, p. 181)
As Elias notes in his correspondence with Bourdieu: ‘I so much regret there is little opportunity for us to sit together and so discuss peacefully and leisurely the problems that arise from our common resolve to develop sociological theory in constant cross-fertilization with empirical research. We both, if I understand it rightly, are at one in our conviction that for sociological theory to come into its own one has to break with the whole tradition of the egocentric philosophical transcendentalism though perhaps I am a bit more unrelenting.... I have great hopes of a further advance of your theoretical work through the development of the field concept. How stimulating it could be to sit together and to compare your and my habitus concept. Both have a front directed against ideas and idealism. There are similarities and differences. Alas, I know we have so little time” (Elias 1987).
Both use a similar terminology of habitus and field, both subscribe to Cassirer’s relational form of analysis, both have a strong Durkheimian social morphology underpinning their approach, and both share a similar political world-view—Republican socialism and radical social democrat respectively. Nevertheless, there are also differences in terms of their philosophical anthropology, the nature of the long-term analysis, the different contexts within which their work emerged—Algeria and the First and Second World Wars—and the divergent nature of the substantive sociological problems they engage with. Bourdieu also tends to draw more on philosophical concepts and vocabulary than Elias.
Others seem idiosynchratic: “I am a strong defender of Elias’s ideas, but I begin to be somewhat vexed by the fact that he enjoys a kind of sacralization today” (Bourdieu 2014, p. 199).
For Elias causality is often more complex, in terms of the reciprocity between cause and effect, and sometimes the term cause needs to be replaced by concept of correspondence. Thus state formation, the increase in division of labor, in the length of chains of interdependence, the growth of towns, trade, and money, and the growth of an administrative apparatus are reinforcing processes with no causal priority.
As Morgan and Orloff (2017) argue, Bourdieu is not alone in his over-reliance on a single, European centralized state (France or Prussia) as a theoretical archetype.
As Hintze adds: “If we want to find out about the relations between military organization and the organization of the state, we must direct our attention particularly to two phenomena, which conditioned the real organization of the state. These are, first, the structure of social classes, and second, the external ordering of the states—their position relative to each other, and their overall position in the world. It one-sided, exaggerated and therefore false to consider class conflict the only driving force in history. Conflict between nations has been far more important; and throughout the ages, pressure from without has been a determining influence on internal structure. It has even often suppressed internal strife or forced it into compromise. Both of these forces have manifestly worked together in the design of the military order and the state organization” (1975, p. 183).
John Hobson, Human Figurations, vol. 1, no. 2 (2012).
L. Wacquant, (ed.) Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics: the Mystery of Ministry (Cambridge: Polity 2005), p.134.
A person’s two consciousnesses: “one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with all his fellow workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one, superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed (Gramsci 1973, p. 333).
Bourdieu may be justified in not using the term class in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, but is he also in the seventeenth or twentieth when he still sees the state nobility as a status group? Is not the class condition of its members, as for example in Goldmann’s The Hidden God (1964), where Jansenism and Pascal’s and Racine’s tragic disposition to the world are outlined, of some importance?
The partial exception here is Riley (2015).
Nor does Bourdieu subscribe to the role of corporations to mediate the relation between the individual and state as both Hegel and Durkheim did.
Although he does not enumerate their theoretical convergences, we could argue that this is not just in terms of (i) their joint focus on corporations as a crucial mediation between the individual and the state, but also (ii) the moral dimension of the state built around the free rational individual, (iii) the idea that modern state formation and individualization were concomitant processes, (iv) the notion of the state as an organic whole, a larger life greater and above the individual wills that compose it, (v) the shared emphasis on the unifying role of patriotism, (vi) the recognition of the beneficial aspects of increasing social division of labour, (vii.) the convergence betweem Durkheim’s view of the state as serving the “general interest” and Hegel’s belief that it represents the “universal interest” (ultimately derived from Rousseau).
See Hegel (1991), paragraph 294. However, he did feel that these interests would be checked by the multiplicity of corporations and voluntary organizations.
The Polanyian notion of re-embedding on the other hand (Polanyi 2001, 1968) refers, not only to the bilateral relationship between market and state, but to the trilateral balance among the modes of integration defined by market, state, and reciprocity /livelihood. Insensitive to the possible role of reciprocity as a mode of integration, Bourdieu, like his Marxist protagonists, is an unabashed modernist.
We owe this insight to Jeremy Lane—personal communication.
Strictly speaking, we should note that Marx in this work sees the positive and negative side of capitalism rather than of the state.
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Loyal, S., Quilley, S. The particularity of the universal: critical reflections on Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power and the state. Theor Soc 46, 429–462 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9298-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9298-y