January 6, 2001
By EMILY EAKIN
PARIS By almost any measure, Pierre Bourdieu is France's most influential intellectual. A professor of sociology at the Collège de France, an exclusive government- supported think tank for the academic A- list, he also holds an appointment at the prestigious École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, edits a leading sociology journal and oversees a popular imprint of works of social criticism.
Mr. Bourdieu's name appears in the French press almost weekly. Important literary journals have dedicated entire issues to his work. His last three books have been best sellers. When he speaks out against free-market economics or anti-immigration legislation, it is national news. Last month, a two-and-a-half-hour documentary about Mr. Bourdieu titled "Sociology Is a Combat Sport," had its premiere.
Nor is his influence limited to France. The International Sociological Association named his "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste" one of the 20th century's 10 most important works of sociology. And in American universities, his work is enjoying a vogue of the sort not seen since the ideas of the last big French theorist, Jacques Derrida, hit American shores in the 1970's.
Mr. Bourdieu, in short, has "symbolic capital" in spades. The term, one of several for which he is known, means, roughly, social status, and in the grand theoretical schemes he has elaborated over the last four decades, it is all-important. Human society, in Mr. Bourdieu's view, resembles nothing so much as a fiercely competitive contest in which status is the ultimate prize. To do well, it helps to have economic capital (financial assets), social capital (networks of connections, a good Rolodex) and cultural capital (specialized skills and knowledge, an Ivy League diploma).
Of course, except for the wealthiest and best-educated, most people have little capital of any kind at their disposal. And, Mr. Bourdieu says, most stand little chance of obtaining any. In many ways Mr. Bourdieu's is a dark vision featuring perpetual class conflict, largely futile struggles for power and prestige and a society divided between the dominators and the dominated.
"The point of my work is to show that culture and education aren't simply hobbies or minor influences," Mr. Bourdieu said in French during a recent interview in his office, a modest but elegant room at the Collège de France in Paris's Latin Quarter. "They are hugely important in the affirmation of differences between groups and social classes and in the reproduction of those differences."
At 70, Mr. Bourdieu is a soft-spoken, gray- haired man with a gravelly chuckle and a kindly smile. He is surprisingly unassuming for someone whom many French regard as possibly their last great maître penseur or "master thinker" a title previously awarded to such sweeping philosophers of social existence as Sartre and Foucault.
Everyone, he argues, comes into adult life with a predisposition to succeed or fail, what he calls "habitus": a set of deeply ingrained experiences that in important ways limit one's performance.
A basketball player's ability to sink a shot during a high-pressure game, for example, is not only a function of natural athletic skill but also of habitus: the number of hours he has practiced, the encouragement from his coach, his psychological expectation of success. At a social level, habitus describes the way people internalize class distinctions and how that makes movement up the ladder difficult. "Habitus is not fatal," said Mr. Bourdieu. "But unfortunately it can move only within very limited parameters. It's like a little computer program that guides one's choices."
Unlike other grand systematizers to whom he is indebted Foucault and Marx prominent among them Mr. Bourdieu has tested his ideas through detailed field work.
In more than two dozen volumes dense with charts, statistics and often impenetrable academic prose, he has taken on one aspect of French culture after another, from the state-subsidized universities to the pundits who regularly turn up on the evening news to that most celebrated if ephemeral of national attributes: taste. In each case, he has sought to demonstrate how social conventions and institutions, even in a democracy officially dedicated to equal opportunity, mostly serve to maintain the status quo with its widespread inequalities.
Admission to France's elite "grandes ecoles" (the equivalent of Ivy League schools), for example, is determined purely on the basis of performance on a national exam. But when Mr. Bourdieu analyzed several classes of admitted students, he found that the overwhelming majority were children of the upper classes. They were both more likely to take the exam in the first place and to use the kind of cultivated language and analytic reasoning apt to be judged favorably by examiners.
"The French school system appears to be meritocratic but in fact it's very conservative," Mr. Bourdieu said. "Education, which is always presented as an instrument of liberation and universality, is really a privilege."
Partly because of his emphasis on cultural rather than economic factors, Mr. Bourdieu's work on education initially had few enthusiasts in the United States.
"Many of us," said David Swartz, a sociologist at Boston University and the author of "Culture & Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu" (University of Chicago Press, 1997), "thought that money the ability to pay tuition or purchase a house in a neighborhood with a good public school was what explained unequal attainment and performance in school.
"What Bourdieu contributed was to say cultural socialization was the explanation. He was writing in a country where education was tuition-free and one still found enormous class differences in attainment and performance.'
Similarly, when "Distinction," Mr. Bourdieu's book on taste, appeared in English in 1984, the reaction was lukewarm. His exhaustive analysis of the class implications of everything from potluck dinners and table etiquette to book and newspaper preferences encountered resistance from American sociologists.
This resulted partly from a conviction that, as Douglas Holt, a professor of marketing at the Harvard Business School, put it, "we're not a class-based society and that status works in a crasser way here: it's driven by money, not culture." Moreover, even researchers interested in class had found that consumption habits did not tend to reveal very much about class affiliation: you cannot distinguish rich from poor on the basis of who shops at the Gap or listens to Eminem.
Lately, however, "Distinction" has found more sympathetic readers. "People were taking Bourdieu too literally," said Mr. Holt, who has applied some of Mr. Bourdieu's theory in his own work. "Distinction can happen through objects, but that's not Bourdieu's theory. That's a simple theory of status goods. His idea is that if you own certain pieces of difficult modern art or enjoy difficult pieces of Bach, you have developed the cultural apparatus to enjoy these things. You have to study how people consume rather than what they consume."
In Mr. Bourdieu's analysis, perhaps no group comes off as badly as intellectuals. Because they tend to be people with prestigious jobs and educational credentials, writers, pundits and academic experts reinforce the idea that knowledge is the exclusive possession of the social elite, he argues.
His most withering attacks are directed at what he calls "total intellectuals," charismatic self-promoters who abuse their special social status and the public trust by speaking out on issues from the war in Bosnia to peace in the Middle East on which they have no real expertise.
In his best-selling 1996 polemic, "On Television," Mr. Bourdieu denounced talk-show commentators as "fast thinkers" who substitute "cultural fast food" politically sanitized sound bites and clich s for substantive argument. And he has not hesitated to name names.
Which is why, in Mr. Bourdieu's own estimation, in addition to being France's most visible thinker, he may be its most villified as well. "I have a lot of enemies," he said.
Some detractors charge him with oversimplifying social reality. "He sees life as a zero-sum-game, in which we're all struggling to maximize our social position," said Michele Lamont, a sociologist at Princeton and the author of "The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class and Immigration" (Harvard University Press, 2000). "In my work, I found that rank is not based on social position alone. Morality is also very important and may act as a deterrent in the pursuit of social advantage."
Others accuse him of trying to create universal concepts out of conditions peculiar to France. In the United States, for example, some critics point out, intellectuals tend to have nowhere near the same kind of public visibility or clout. Others dismiss his work as a "sociology of the obvious." Is it news to anyone that the education system isn't really meritocratic?, these critics ask.
But by far the most frequent complaint is that Mr. Bourdieu is a hypocrite: How can France's most successful academic-intellectual expect to be taken seriously as a critic of academic and intellectual life?
As Alain Finkielkraut, a well-known political commentator and target of Mr. Bourdieu's attacks, put it in a recent essay, unlike everyone else, "when he speaks, apparently it's the truth talking." Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, a historian, gathered her objections into an emotionally charged book titled "The Wise Man and Politics: An Essay on the Sociological Terrorism of Pierre Bourdieu."
There is no question that Mr. Bourdieu is an exemplary product of the social system he attacks. "He's the ultimate scholarship boy," said Robert Darnton, a historian at Princeton who describes Mr. Bourdieu's work as an "inexhaustible source of insight" for his own research on 18th-century France. "He's won every scholarship, every prize. He began from very humble roots and now dominates the summit of French intellectual life."
It is hard not to see in Mr. Bourdieu's own career a glaring exception to his sociological rules. Born into a poor family in a tiny village in rural southwestern France, he spoke Gascon, now a moribund regional dialect, until he started elementary school. His father was an itinerant sharecropper turned postman who never finished high school. All in all, not circumstances conducive to an auspicious habitus, especially for an aspiring master thinker.
Mr. Bourdieu's father was determined that his son should succeed, and he enrolled him at the region's best high school. Eventually he won admission to the École Normale Superieure, the traditional alma mater of French intellectuals. But he denies that his own story contradicts his thesis, contending that by letting in a token number of students from the lower classes, the system maintains the illusion of meritocracy.
Though Mr. Bourdieu graduated at the top of his class, he was repulsed by the Parisian intellectual milieu. "A lot of what I've done has been in reaction to the École Normale," he said. "I think if I hadn't become a sociologist, I would have become very anti-intellectual. I was horrified by that world."
A stint as a teacher in Algiers during Algeria's war for independence led him to abandon philosophy for social science. His first several books, ethnographies about the plight of Algerians under French colonialism, were also implicit rebukes to the Parisian establishment.
"I thought that the French didn't understand a thing about what was happening in Algeria," he said, "in large part because the intellectuals holding forth on the issue didn't know anything about it."
The last thing he wanted or expected, Mr. Bourdieu insists, was to become part of the intellectual establishment. He said he rebuffed overtures from the College de France for three years in a row. Finally, in 1981, he relented.
"It was a horrible trial for me," he said. "I didn't want to join the College mostly because of this idea that I was going to become a big deal. My father died the same year and I think I linked these two events psychologically. I had six months of virtual total insomnia."
The worst part of the ordeal, he said, was delivering his inaugural address, a centuries-old tradition in which incoming members present a speech in his case, also published on the front page of Le Monde to the entire College and various dignitaries, an audience that in Mr. Bourdieu's case included towering figures like Levi-Strauss and Foucault as well as the mayor of Paris and the French ministers of culture and education.
"Up until that very afternoon, he thought he wasn't going to go,"said Loïc Wacquant, a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley and a close friend. "It was like Sartre refusing the Nobel Prize. He just could not bring himself to participate in this ritual of public consecration."
In the end Mr. Bourdieu overcame his revulsion and delivered his address. Its subject? A sociological critique of the cultural value placed on inaugural lectures.
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