Sociology and Philosophy in the Work of Bourdieu.pdf

Journal of Classical Sociology

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Sociology and Philosophy in the Work of

Pierre Bourdieu, 1965–75 1

DEREK ROBBINS University of East London

ABSTRACT The paper ﬁrst offers a brief account of the competition between the

Durkheimian sociological tradition and German philosophy in the period in which

Bourdieu was a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure . It indicates the intel-

lectual inﬂuences of the early years that Bourdieu subsequently acknowledged and

then examines his use of the work of Weber in his ﬁrst book, Sociologie de l’Algerie

(1958). The paper then focuses on the development of Bourdieu’s thought from

the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, a period in which he strategically presented

himself as an anti-humanist sociologist whilst also articulating a view of science

that was in tune with phenomenological and ontological philosophy. Bourdieu’s

‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945’ (1967a) receives particular

attention since his analysis of sociology and philosophy in France in the post-war

period was a key element in his own position-taking in respect of the two

disciplines. The paper then examines Bourdieu’s critiques of Weber at this time

and suggests that his dissatisfaction with Weber’s epistemology logically became a

dissastisfaction with the claims of sociological explanation as such. There followed

an attempt to reconcile a commitment to social science with an allegiance to

elements of phenomenological thought. The outcome was a willingness on

Bourdieu’s part to see reﬂexivity as a means to problematiz- ing sociological

explanation more than as a means to reﬁning it or making it more sophisticated.

The consequence was that commitments to phenomenological ontology and

social science co-existed in this period. The balance was to change again subse-

quently in Bourdieu’s thought, and his responsivenesss to changing conditions

exempliﬁes how we should ourselves rethink the relations between possible future

social theories and the classical theories of Western sociology.

KEYWORDS Bourdieu, phenomenology, philosophy, sociology, Weber

The speciﬁcity of the title is signiﬁcant in two respects. Bourdieu insisted that the

relations between disciplines or modes of thinking are not immutable or atem-

poral. In particular, the relations between sociology and philosophy are, in his

word, ‘arbitrary’, or, perhaps more precisely, socially and historically contingent.

In part, this article explores Bourdieu’s representation of this contingency in

French intellectual life, but it is also an article that considers the contingency

within Bourdieu’s own intellectual production during one decade. I begin by

offering a brief account of the competition between the Durkheimian sociological

tradition and German philosophy in the period in which Bourdieu was a student

at the Ecole Normale Superieure . I indicate, ﬁrstly, the intellectual inﬂuences of his

early years, which Bourdieu subsequently acknowledged, and then examine his

use of the work of Weber in his ﬁrst book – Sociologie de l’Algerie (1958). I then

focus on the development of Bourdieu’s thought from the mid-1960s to the mid-

1970s, a period in which he strategically presented himself as an anti-humanist

sociologist whilst also articulating a view of science that was in tune with

phenomenological and ontological philosophy. Bourdieu’s ‘Sociology and Philos-

ophy in France since 1945’ (1967a) receives particular attention since his analysis

of sociology and philosophy in France in the post-war period was a key element in

his own position-taking in respect of the two disciplines. The article examines

Bourdieu’s critiques of Weber and suggests that his dissatisfaction with Weber’s

epistemology logically became a dissatisfaction with the claims of sociological

explanation as such. There followed an attempt to reconcile a commitment to

social science with an allegiance to elements of phenomenological thought. The

outcome was a willingness on Bourdieu’s part to see reﬂexivity as a means to

problematizing sociological explanation more than as a means to reﬁning it or

making it more sophisticated. The consequence was that commitments to phe-

nomenological ontology and social science co-existed in this period. The balance

was to change again subsequently in Bourdieu’s thought, and his responsiveness

to changing conditions exempliﬁes how we should ourselves rethink the relations

between possible social theories and the classical theories of Western sociology.

The State of French Sociology in the 1920s

Georges Davy published Sociologues d’hier et d’aujourd’hui in 1931. It was a

collection of four studies – on Espinas, Durkheim, McDougall in relation to

Durkheimian sociology, and Levy-Bruhl – that had been published in French

journals during the 1920s, preceded by an article on ‘La Sociologie Française de

1918 a 1925’, which had ﬁrst been published in English in The Monist in 1926. In

spite of the consideration of American social psychology in the third study, the

collection was narrowly nationalist. There were no references to American

sociology or to Marx or Weber. The assessment of past and present sociologists

indicated by the title amounted exclusively to a consideration of the progress of an

independent French tradition. Davy was a ﬁrst-generation Durkheimian, which

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JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY VOL 2(3)

meant that he saw himself as a second-generation positivist. Born at the time of

Comte’s death, Levy-Bruhl and Durkheim separately and differently as students at

the Ecole Normale Superieure in the 1880s began to give intellectual and

institutional ﬂesh to the emergent ‘sociology’ sketched in the Cours de philosophie

positive . Born in 1883 and also a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure , Davy

became associated with the Annee Sociologique ‘cluster’ (Clark, 1973) in 1910,

and as early as 1912 – ﬁve years before the death of Durkheim – published a

choice of Durkheim texts with an introductory study of his sociological system in

a series devoted to ‘Les Grands Philosophes. Français et etrangers’ (Davy,

1912).

Davy was an apologist for Durkheim. Writing his introduction to Socio-

logues d’hier et d’aujourd’hui in 1926, he celebrated the pioneering work of Saint-

Simon and Comte with ‘their idea of a distinct social reality, the object of a

distinct social science as objective as the other sciences’ (1931: 6), which was the

origin of a ‘positivist and rationalist sociology’ that, he argued, had been in eclipse

for a good quarter of a century. Davy was convinced that this sociology was going

to be reborn with the work of Espinas and spread with the work of Durkheim and

his school. During this period of ‘eclipse’ – presumably between 1900 and 1925 –

Davy was prepared to acknowledge the importance of the followers of Le Play,

particularly in respect of their methodology, but there was no doubt in his mind

that the future lay with the Durkheimians. He welcomed the editions of the work

of Saint-Simon which were published in 1924 and 1925 under the inﬂuence of

Bougle and the appearance of key posthumous editions of Durkheim’s work in

the mid-1920s, and he warmly praised Bougle’s own work and that of Fauconnet,

placing his own texts, particularly Le droit, l’idealisme et l’experience (1922),

within the same increasingly dominant Durkheimian movement. The emergent

intellectual dominance was in the process of being underpinned by signiﬁcant

institutional developments. At the end of his introductory article, Davy pointed to

the fact that sociology had now been accepted within the Licence and had also

been introduced as a subject for study in the ecoles normales primaires and for the

baccalaureat . The mutual support of institutional and intellectual trends was

consolidated by the production of several sociology textbooks, one of which was

his own Elements de sociologie (1924). Davy was conﬁdent that he was part of an

unstoppable resurgence of sociological analysis that was still ﬁrmly attached to

the ideological and methodological commitments of the mid-19th-century

founders.

Inﬂuences on French Thought after 1930

Pierre Bourdieu was born in 1930 and he studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure

from 1951 to 1955. The situation was by then far from what Davy had expected.

Shortly before the year of publication of Sociologues d’hier et d’aujourd’hui ,

Edmund Husserl had given what were to be published as his Paris Lectures

ROBBINS PIERRE BOURDIEU, 1965–75

301

(Husserl, 1964). By the mid-1950s, Merleau-Ponty had researched the Husserl

Archive in Louvain and was inﬂuential in disseminating his ideas in France.

Lyotard wrote a small introduction to phenomenology in 1954 in which he

discussed Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and Bourdieu’s near contemporary at the

Ecole , Derrida, was writing an introduction to a translation of Husserl’s Origins of

Geometry (Derrida, 1974). Also in 1954, Foucault participated in the translation

of Ludwig Binswanger’s Traum und Existenz , and wrote a long introductory

discussion of existential psychiatry for it. The inﬂuence of Heidegger was apparent

here as it had been in the work of Sartre during the 1930s leading to the

publication of L’ Etre et le neant in 1943. Meanwhile, Raymond Aron had been

responsible for introducing the work of Dilthey, Rickert, Simmel and Weber in his

Essai sur la theorie de l’histoire dans l’Allemagne contemporaine (1938). Equally, of

course, Jean Hyppolite in particular had been responsible for the renewed interest

in Hegel and for the consequential rise of Marxist existentialism that has been

described in detail by Mark Poster (1975). In parallel with this French interest in

German thought in the period between 1930 and 1960 was the tangible effect of

the period of the Second World War on the institutional situation of sociology.

Davy’s conﬁdence was misplaced, for very tangible reasons. Appended to Roger

Geiger’s article ‘Durkheimian Sociology under Attack: The Controversy over

Sociology in the Ecoles Normales Primaires’ (in Besnard, 1983) is a letter written

in 1941 from the Vatican City by the Vichy Regime’s ambassador to the Vatican,

who had been a civil servant at the time of the introduction of sociology into the

curriculum of the ecoles normales primaires , which Davy celebrated in 1931. Leon

Berard wrote:

Let us return to the program of the Ecoles Normales Primaires of 1920.

. . . to these normal school students who came from the Higher Primary

Schools, who had not done one hour of philosophy, they were going to

teach not philosophy, but, among the hundreds or thousands of diverse

systems, one ﬁxed system of philosophy: Durkheim’s sociology. I must tell

you that for several years the teachings of that rabbinical ideologue had

become a sort of ofﬁcial and practically obligatory academic doctrine. The

sociologists were in possession of magisterial chairs at the Sorbonne. . . .

From them emanated the decisive and directing inﬂuences.

(Besnard, 1983: 135)

Only in 1941 could this anti-semitic opposition to sociology have been so clearly

articulated. There was, perhaps, an unholy afﬁnity between the French vogue for

German philosophy that developed in the 1930s and the decline of French

sociology in the 1940s. Certainly, in the interview of 1985 in which Bourdieu

recollected his student days, he insisted that sociology teaching was intellectually

moribund and that his fellow normaliens treated the subject with contempt. Fed

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the line by his questioners that philosophy was dominated by a sociologist in the

early 1950s, Bourdieu replied:

No – that was just the effect of institutional authority. And our contempt

for sociology was intensiﬁed by the fact that a sociologist could be

president of the board of examiners of the competitive ‘agregation’ exam

in philosophy and force us to attend his lectures – which we thought were

lousy – on Plato and Rousseau.

(1990: 5)

Bourdieu was referring here to Georges Davy. Davy’s authority epitomized for

him the contemporary condition of Durkheimianism. It possessed institutional

capital but had forfeited intellectual capital.

Bourdieu’s Philosophical Training

In considering the relationship of Bourdieu’s work to the classical tradition of

sociology, it is important to keep ﬁrmly in mind the fact that he was trained in

philosophy and was not at all formally educated either as a sociologist or as an

anthropologist. For his diplome d’etudes superieures , he prepared a translation of

Leibniz’s Animadversiones in partem generalem Principiorum cartesianorum and

wrote a commentary on it under the supervision of Henri Gouhier, a historian of

philosophy. In one of his last interviews – with Yvette Delsaut (Delsaut & Riviere,

2002) – Bourdieu did not deny that whilst he was teaching at the Lycee in Moulins

from 1955 to 1956 he had registered to write a these d’etat under the supervision

of Georges Canguilhem on ‘Les structures temporelles de la vie affective’. It

appears that this did not materialize but, in the 1985 interview from which I have

already quoted, Bourdieu mentioned that he had ‘undertaken research into the

“phenomenology of emotional life”, or more exactly into the temporal structures

of emotional experience’ (1990: 6–7), and it seems likely that he was referring to

this unwritten or incomplete thesis. In the same interview, Bourdieu supplied

more information about the people who had inﬂuenced his intellectual develop-

ment when he was a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure . There are several

important components of this development.

First of all, Bourdieu acknowledged that he had ‘read Being and Nothing-

ness very early on, and then Merleau-Ponty and Husserl’. He was, therefore, well

aware of what he called ‘phenomenology, in its existentialist variety’. He argued

that he had never ‘really got into the existentialist mood’, but, nevertheless

admitted that:

I read Heidegger, I read him a lot and with a certain fascination, especially

the analyses in Sein und Zeit of public time, history and so on, which,

together with Husserl’s analyses in Ideen II , helped me a great deal – as

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