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Vol. 3 No. 20 · 5 November 1981

Snobs
Jon Elster
6510 words

La Distinction: Critique Sociale du Jugement Jon Elster

by Pierre Bourdieu.
Editions de Minuit, 670 pp., £9.05, August 1979, 2 7073 0275 9
Jon Elster is the author of Logic
and Society and Ulysses and the
Sirens. He is a lecturer at the
University of Oslo.
In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France – in the very chair occupied today by
Pierre Bourdieu – Raymond Aron coined the word ‘sociodicy’: an apt term for the
apologetic tendency of much contemporary social science, a tendency which has a
long ancestry, going back to the theodicies of the 17th century. Within the theological
tradition two ways of justifying evil emerged: pain and sin, which could be seen either
as indispensable conditions for the good of the universe as a whole, or as inevitable MORE BY THIS

by-products of an optimal package solution. The first was that of Leibniz, who CONTRIBUTOR

suggested that monsters, for instance, had the function of helping us to see the Chinese Leaps
beauty of the normal. The second was that of Malebranche, who poured scorn on the 25 APRIL 1991
idea that God created monstrous birth defects ‘pour le bénéfice des sages-femmes’, and
argued that accidents and mishaps should be understood as the cost God had to pay
When Communism
for the choice of simple and general laws of nature. In both cases, the argument was,
dissolves
of course, intended to explain that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds.
25 JANUARY 1990

There is no logical reason why the best of all possible worlds should contain the best
of all possible societies. Perhaps the miseries of human society are to be explained by Jon Elster goes
the edifying function they have for the inhabitants of other worlds or the celestial to China
spheres. Yet Leibniz in his sociological writings consistently applied the logic of 27 OCTOBER 1988

theodicy to history and society: he justified luxury, for instance, as a regrettable but More by Jon Elster
unavoidable side-effect of prosperity. It was left to Bernard Mandeville – the founder
of the modern sociodicy – to argue more boldly that luxury, by creating employment,
was actually a means to prosperity. The theme struck by The Fable of the Bees has been
pursued for more than two centuries, by Adam Smith, Malinowski, Merton and many
others. To cite just two examples: income inequalities are justified by their positive
effect on savings, investment, average income and ultimately on minimal income;
political apathy is seen as a functional prerequisite for modern democratic systems
which would risk overload and breakdown if participation became widespread. Seen
in isolation, poverty and political alienation may appear undesirable, but in the wider
perspective one can argue that even the worst-off would be made worse-off by
attempts to improve their situation.

Sociodicy as a legitimating device has been closely wedded to functionalism as an

explanatory framework. Once it has been pointed out that certain deplorable
phenomena have good net consequences, it is only a short step to the argument that
the latter also explain the causes that produce them. Logically speaking, this
argument has no validity unless one can also document the causal link from the effect
to the maintenance of the cause, but few authors take the trouble to do this. There
has been, and still is, an incredible sloppiness in much sociological work, which
tacitly assumes that a social institution or a behavioural pattern is explained once its
‘latent functions’ have been identified.

It should not be thought, however, that this sloppiness is found only in bourgeois
sociology defending the status quo. That functionalism can be dissociated from
sociodicy is amply proved by the various strands of Marxist or radical social science.
Marx’s case is especially interesting. He played like a virtuoso on two explanatory
registers: social phenomena could be accounted for in terms either of their beneficial
consequences for capitalism or their favourable effects for the transition to socialism.
He explained social mobility by pointing out that it was useful for the capitalist class
to attract the best minds of the exploited class; and he suggested that the business
cycle could be explained as a means of keeping a combative class-consciousness alive
among the workers. He was, indeed, obsessed with the idea that all social
phenomena have a meaning – and correspondingly blind to the notion that there could
also be sound and fury in social life, unintended consequences with no function or
significance whatsoever. Later radical sociologists have mainly emphasised the
functionality of institutions for the maintenance and entrenchment of oppression.
Crime exists because society needs a scapegoat; mental illness because of social
‘labelling’; educational institutions prepare children for the capitalist work
discipline; and so on in a dreary, familiar drone. It’s a school whose slogan could be
that all is for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds. Or it could appropriate the
label on a denim jacket I once bought in San Francisco: ‘Any defect or fault in this
garment is intentional and part of the design.’ The proponents of this view offer an
inverted sociodicy wedded to a frictionless functionalist mode of explanation.

In France the current supports – as some of them might put it – of this mode of
analysis include Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. In a number of works Foucault
has set out to explain madness, crime and sexuality in the light of the Machiavellian
question, Cuibono? And he has invariably found patterns which serve the interests of
the oppressing classes and are to be explained by the fact that they serve these
interests. Consider a characteristic passage from his work on the penitentiary system,
Discipline and Punish:

But perhaps one should reverse the problem and ask oneself what is served by the
failure of the prison; what is the use of these different phenomena that are continually
being criticised; the maintenance of delinquency, the encouragement of recidivism, the
transformation of the occasional offender into a habitual delinquent, the organisation of
a closed milieu of delinquency. Perhaps one should look for what is hidden beneath the
apparent cynicism of the penal institution, which, after purging the convicts by means of
their sentence, continues to follow them by a whole series of ‘brandings’ (a surveillance
that was once de jure and which is today de facto; the police record that has taken the place
of the convict’s passport) and which thus pursues as a ‘delinquent’ someone who has
acquitted himself of his punishment as an offender? Can we not see here a consequence
rather than a contradiction? If so, one would be forced to suppose that the prison, and
no doubt punishment in general, is not intended to eliminate offences, but rather to
distinguish them, to distribute them, to use them; that it is not so much that they render
docile those who are liable to transgress the law, but that they tend to assimilate the
transgression of the laws in a general tactics of subjection. Penality would then appear to
be a way of handling illegalities, of laying down the limits of tolerance, of giving free rein
to some, of putting pressure on others, of excluding a particular section, of making
another useful, of neutralising certain individuals and of profiting from others.

Observe the use of predicates which have only objects, never subjects. Althusser
remarks of Hegel that he had the merit of seeing history as a process without a
subject, but one may doubt whether this was really an advance when he also retained
the idea that history was directed by a goal. A goal without a subject for whom it is a
goal is an incoherent notion. I am reminded of Leibniz’s curt comment on the Neo-
Confucianist philosophy: ‘je doute fort qu’ils aient la vaine subtilité d’admettre une sagesse sans
admettre un sage.’ Similarly there is much vain subtlety in Foucault’s conception of a
diabolical plan to which there corresponds no devilish planner.

Pierre Bourdieu has been engaged with a similar argument for a number of years, and
in La Distinction it reaches its culmination. His earlier works, Les Héritiers and La
Reproduction (both written with J.-C. Passeron), were influential during May ’68 and its
aftermath, no doubt because they conveyed this image of a society systematically
organised for the reproduction of inequality, even – or especially – through the
institutions nominally designed to counteract it. In particular, Bourdieu argued that
French academic institutions strongly reinforced traditional inequalities, notably by
using an inaccessible and convoluted language. This critique of the mandarin
language, however, was couched in a language no less esoteric. As will be painfully
obvious to any reader of La Distinction, Bourdieu is a past-master of the opaque
sentence, with nesting sub-clauses and parentheses. It could perhaps be said that by
making no concessions to the reader, Bourdieu at least has not invited the easy
popularity which has made much of French intellectual life into a battleground for
charlatans. But I do not believe that the price needed paying; that clarity and
simplicity cannot be achieved without superficiality. Moreover, it is not only the
reader who gets lost in the page-long sentences: it is hard to believe that Bourdieu
himself is not seriously hampered by his style. Inconsistency of thought easily goes
undetected when embedded in such complexity of expression.

These remarks, however, are comments on style, not on substance, and Bourdieu has
a lot of substance – indeed, his work overflows with it. La Distinction has many
weaknesses: but it is impossible to deny the vitality, intelligence and sensitivity
constantly displayed in its pages. Although Bourdieu often stresses the ‘scientific’ and
‘rigorous’ aspect of his work, its virtues are, rather, those of a good novel. For one
thing, the use of photographs – from the everyday life of people of various social
classes – is marvellously effective in conveying Bourdieu’s all-important notion of the
ethos or habitus which characterises a social class or fraction of a class. He refuses to
group people in terms of variables such as income or opinions, and insists that many
of the real unifying and dividing features are such as to slip through the standard
sociological net. Bodily posture or control, for example, are instantly recognisable as
criteria of class, as is also the experience (or lack of it) reflected in facial wrinkles (or
lack of them). The photograph of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing playing tennis is revealing,
not simply because it shows a member of the élite playing the sport of the élite: it is,
above all, illuminating because it expresses a tautness of control which reflects the
habit of power better than any conventional criteria could.

Bourdieu has co-authored a book on the sociology of photography (Un Art Moyen), and
is clearly very sensitive to the nuances of that medium. A striking technique employed
in La Distinction is to ask people of different social backgrounds whether they think
that a given object or event would be a good choice for a beautiful photograph. To
suggest that an insignificant everyday object such as a cabbage could be made into a
work of art reveals upper-class origins as surely as a preference for folk-dancing or
sunsets indicates middle-class origins. The same ingenuity and inventiveness can be
seen in many other observations. Eliciting evidence of the musical taste of various
social groups, Bourdieu asked his subjects both about the musical works they could
enumerate and about the works they personally liked. Both sets of answers are
revealing, but in addition Bourdieu notes that the very fact of someone being able to
cite a work which he does not like is indicative of upper-class origins. Bourdieu
displays here imaginative insights which are the mark of the great novelist or the great
phenomenological sociologist. At his – unfortunately, intermittent – best, Bourdieu
can be classed with Georg Simmel as a master of the illuminating fait divers.

La Distinction is about symbolic competition, in arenas such as art, sports, newspaper-

reading, interior decoration, food consumption, habits of language, bodily aesthetic
and so on. Nobody would dispute that, in these areas, patterns and choices vary
according to class, but Bourdieu makes the much stronger claim that the differences
which emerge are also distinctions – i.e. choices made in opposition to those made
by other classes. Invoking the linguistic notion of ‘distinctive features’, Bourdieu
suggests that any given practice can only be understood diacritically, in its relation to
other practices in the same arena. One may believe subjectively that one chooses, say,
a given sport for the pleasure it offers, but according to Bourdieu the choice only
makes sense if understood as the choice not to practise other sports which would
appear demeaning or pretentious. For distaste is prior to taste. There is no such thing
as pure and disinterested pleasure in the contemplation of art or in the practice of
sport; or rather, such purity and detachment as may be observed can be explained by
their efficacy in keeping rivals out. The non-instrumental always turns out to have an
instrumental value that explains it; nothing succeeds like the lack of an intention to
succeed. This last observation is also crucial to the marvellous work by Paul Veyne, Le
Pain et le Cirque: but unlike Bourdieu Veyne makes it clear that the useful consequences
of a disregard for useful consequences do not in any way explain that disregard.

To discuss what distinguishes whom from whom, Bourdieu employs as key notions
the idea of ‘capital’, in a suitably generalised sense, and that of ‘strategy’, also in an
extended sense. Capital comes in two main varieties, economic and cultural. These
two forms of capital can, it seems, be added to each other and converted into each
other, although these apparently quantitative notions are left at the stage of
metaphors. The main class distinction, based on the global volume of capital, divides
the economic and cultural élite from the working class and the petty bourgeoisie.
Within the dominant bloc there is a secondary division on the basis of the structure
of capital, opposing the classes with predominantly economic capital (the
bourgeoisie) to those better endowed with cultural capital (intellectuals and artists).
The latter are, as it were, the homologue of the dominated classes within the bloc of
the dominant classes. The working class is seen as largely monolithic and
homogeneous, whereas the petty bourgeoisie is divided into three main groups: the
declining petty bourgeoisie, the ascending and the ‘new’. These differ from each
other, not mainly according to their capital endowment at any given point in time, but
according to their individual and collective trajectories over time. Bourdieu singles
out for special, and vituperative, attention the new petty bourgeoisie, a subject on
which he may perhaps be considered the world’s greatest living specialist. It’s a class
that includes a number of pseudo-professions in publicity, marketing, social science
research, social work, fashionable handicrafts.

Given a particular capital endowment, the agent has to adopt a strategy to make it
yield maximal profits. In spite of the usual connotations of the term, strategies need
not be consciously chosen for the purpose of maximising this profit on capital:
indeed, they may be more efficient if there is no element of intentionality. Nor need
they attach only to individuals, since Bourdieu makes a distinction (nowhere clearly
explained) between individual and collective strategies. It is very difficult to
understand what Bourdieu means by a strategy, but at the very least it would appear to
be a behavioural pattern that has consequences which are beneficial, or even optimal,
relative to other possible patterns, for the agent or agents adopting it. In addition,
Bourdieu strongly suggests that these consequences explain the adoption of the
behavioural pattern, whether it is consciously chosen or not. But, characteristically,
the mechanism by which this comes about in the case of non-conscious strategies is
nowhere spelled out. Since the point is of crucial importance, some examples are in
order.

One of Bourdieu’s favourite expressions is ‘tout se passe comme si’ (‘everything takes
place as if ’): I counted 15 occurrences in La Distinction – others may have escaped me.
The expression allows the speaker to suggest, almost to insinuate, an explanatory
connection, without actually sticking his neck out to the extent of affirming it. Thus:
‘Everything takes place as if the probability of taking up the different sports
depended, within the limits defined by economic (and cultural) capital and spare
time, on perception and assessment of the intrinsic and extrinsic profits of each sport
in terms of the dispositions of the habitus and, more precisely, in terms of the relation
to one’s own body, which is one dimension of this.’ Or again: ‘Everything takes place
as if the “popular aesthetic” were based on the affirmation of the continuity between
art and life, which implies the subordination of form to function, or, one might say,
on a refusal of the refusal which is the starting-point of the high aesthetic.’ This
example is particularly significant, since it enables us to see Bourdieu making a
crucial (and unwarranted) leap from the absence of a popular refusal of the continuity
of art and life to a refusal of that refusal.

Bourdieu’s semi-conspiratorial, semi-functionalist world view also emerges in the

following condescending remarks on evening classes: ‘It is not uncommon for the
demands of personal salvation – evening classes or docility towards superiors – to
come into conflict with the demands of collective salvation – union solidarity etc – for
practical reasons and also because they spring from two totally opposed visions of the
social world. Efforts at retraining or at internal promotion (competitions etc) would
not be so positively sanctioned were it not that, in addition to technical upgrading,
they also guarantee adherence to the institution and to the social order’ (my italics).
Finally, a somewhat longer quote will help the reader to appreciate in full the flavour
of his prose and reasoning:

In place of statistical boundaries, which leave groups surrounded by the ‘hybrid’ zone of
which Plato speaks with regard to the boundary of being and non-being, a challenge to
the discriminatory power of social taxonomies (Young or old? Rich or poor? Middle-
class or lower-middle?), the numerus clausus, in the extreme form it receives from
discriminatory law, sets sharp, arithmetical limits; in place of principles of selection, of
inclusion and exclusion, based on a number of fairly closely interrelated and normally
implicit criteria, it sets up an institutionalised and therefore conscious and organised
process of segregation and discrimination, based on a single criterion (no women, or
Jews, or Blacks) which leaves no room for misclassification. In fact, the most select
groups prefer to avoid the brutality of discriminatory measures and to combine the
charms of the apparent absence of criteria, which allows the members the illusion of
election on grounds of personal uniqueness, with the certainties of selection, which
ensures maximum group homogeneity.

It is hard to see what Plato has to do with all this. Had Bourdieu been writing this
review, he would have dismissed the reference to Plato with the comment: ‘Ça fait
littéraire’ (just as he would have explained the references to ‘capital’ and ‘strategy’ with
the comment: ‘Ça fait scientifique’). My explanation is simpler: lack of discipline and
control. This also holds for the conclusion of the passage, which seems to assert both
that the members of the selective groups adopt a given arrangement because they
prefer it and that they are under the illusion that it does not operate. If Bourdieu
wants to argue that the system comes about because it procures greater satisfaction
for the members of the groups than any alternative system would procure, even
though they do now know this, then he owes us an explanation of the precise causal
links that shape this happy outcome. If he wants to argue that the members engage in
self-deception, then he should say so – and also sketch an account of that notoriously
elusive phenomenon.

In Bourdieu’s universe there are only snobs, at least according to what I shall call his
official view. Everybody is all the time looking over his shoulder, or at least tout se passe
comme si that is what everybody is doing. Bourdieu appears to know all there is to
know about one-upmanship, except that one-upmanship is not all there is to know.
He is a great debunker, but carries debunking to ridiculous extremes. One can,
however, learn from his shortcomings as well as from his insights. It is certainly true
that intellectual and cultural life abounds in attempts to carve out niches by sheer
extravagance of thought or conception: indeed, conceptual art may be a prime
example. Like hyperinflation, it can be modelled on the following simple game: ‘All
players are to write down a number. The one who has written the largest number is
declared the winner.’ For another example, consider the following rather inconsistent
characterisation of A.J.P. Taylor by Bernard Crick (Sunday Times, 9 November 1980):
‘Taylor is an admirable writer: not merely does he not pause to look over his shoulder
at what fellow scholars may think; he actually enjoys shocking them.’ Crick imputes
non-conformism to his hero, and goes on to describe him in terms of anti-
conformism – which is, of course, just another kind of conformism. George Orwell,
to take another of Crick’s heroes, is an example of a writer who did not play at being
an enfant terrible; who genuinely shocked, because he was not out to shock. Bourdieu,
to be sure, would say that the disregard for distinction is just another strategy for
achieving it.

Sartre notes in Les Mots: ‘je n’ai pas l’admiration facile.’ This, as will be clear by now, is
twice as true of Bourdieu. In fact, Sartre seems to be about the only writer to wrench
words of admiration from him, on grounds of his ability, as Bourdieu puts it, to ‘call
into question one of the most deeply buried foundations of the social order, Spinoza’s
obsequium, the disposition of those who have “self-respect” and feel entitled to receive
respect’. Sartre’s refusal of the Nobel Prize is referred to approvingly as a sign of his
independence. Bourdieu shares with Sartre a salutary aversion to worldly acclaim – it
is hard to see either of them becoming corrupted. But on his own terms Bourdieu is
not allowed to say this. Surely nothing can be so distinguished as to be offered the
Nobel Prize and then refuse it? Unless there is such a thing as independence of spirit,
which impresses and yet is not designed, subjectively or objectively, to impress,
Bourdieu cannot consistently praise anyone. In the worst of all possible worlds,
nobody is innocent.

There is probably no social activity that does not have its ridiculous side: but it is
ridiculous to think that this is all there is to all social activity. Bourdieu brilliantly
makes fun of the debate about Françoise Dorin’s play Le Tournant, a boulevard comedy
whose protagonist is an author of boulevard comedies who tries to make himself into
an avant-garde writer. The opposition between the two kinds of theatre is reproduced
as an opposition between two kinds of review of the play, from the left and the right
respectively:

As in a set of mirrors, each of the critics in the extreme positions can say exactly what the
critic on the other side would say, but in conditions such that his words take on an ironic
value and denigrate by antiphrasis precisely what the critic on the other side praises. Thus,
the Left Bank critic credits Françoise Dorin with the qualities she prides herself on, but
in his columns, addressed to his readers, they automatically become derisory (so that her
technique becomes a ‘big trick’ and her ‘common sense’ is immediately understood at
bourgeois stupidity). In so doing, he turns on Dorin the weapon she uses against avant-
garde theatre when, exploiting the structural logic of the field, she turns on avant-garde
theatre the weapon it likes to use against ‘bourgeois’ chatter and the ‘bourgeois’ theatre
which reproduces its truisms and clichés (one thinks of lonesco describing The Bald
Prima-Donna or Jacques as ‘a sort of parody or caricature of boulevard theatre, boulevard
theatre decomposing and going mad’).

This is as persuasive as it is brilliant. It expertly captures the peculiarly Parisian Left

Bank stereotypes, turned inward on themselves as in opposing mirrors. But there is
more to art than this battle of clichés. When Bourdieu suggests that ‘le style de vie
artiste est toujours un défi lancé au style de vie bourgeois,’ or that artists are typically out to
‘épater le bourgeois’, he mistakes the accidental for the essential. Most artists most of
the time create their works in order to convince fellow artists of the validity of their
vision, although no doubt all artists some of the time and some artists all of the time
struggle to liberate themselves from the preconceptions of their (largely bourgeois)
environment. Again, for Bourdieu the ideal of simplicity in art can only be a strategy
harnessed to the goal of distinction. When the bourgeois embrace a voluptuous and
over-elaborate style of interior decoration in order to distinguish themselves from the
artless poverty of the people, the avant-garde goes one better by returning to artful
simplicity. This debunking of simplicity makes good sense in the case of Andy
Warhol, but does it throw any light on the art of William Morris?

Bourdieu is generally very good on the aspirations of the petty bourgeoisie and the
reasons they are rarely realised. The petty bourgeoisie are ‘trapped, whatever they do,
in a choice between anxious hyper-identification and the negativism which, in its very
revolt, admits its own defeat’. They tend, he says, to ‘en faire trop par crainte de n’en pas
faire assez’. The reason for their defeat is summed up in a cruel and perceptive remark
made by Mme de Sévigné: ‘Il y a de certaines choses que l’on n’entend jamais quand on ne les
entend pas d’abord.’ Or, as Bourdieu puts it, to gain access to the legitimate culture ‘il
s’agit d’avoir sans avoir jamais acquis.’ The petty bourgeoisie do not have that ‘assurance
dans l’ignorance’ which enables others to walk in safety through cultural minefields.
They show ‘un air de tension dans la détente même’ – the opposite no doubt applies to the
upper classes. Bourdieu is even-handed in his scorn: the pathetic anxiety of the
upward climbers and the lofty disregard of those who oppose their thrust are equally
exposed to ridicule. But I could not help feeling that the pathetic desire to create
states that are essentially by-products of actions undertaken for other ends might
have elicited some compassion from him.

I could go on to summarise Bourdieu’s vignettes of the tastes and distastes of other

social classes – the upper bourgeoisie, intellectuals and professors, the working class
– but the reader should study the work for himself – I can promise insight and
frustration in liberal quantities. I do, however, want to raise two general objections to
the enterprise in which Bourdieu is engaged. First, the crucial relation between class
difference and class distinction seems to me confused and badly worked out.
Secondly, the materialist reduction of taste and preference to social conditions and
social functions appears to be ill-founded and internally inconsistent.

Differences in taste between classes is an objective phenomenon, whereas the notion

of distinction would seem to be a subjective one, requiring some consciousness of the
difference – indeed, a striving for difference. This, I believe, is Bourdieu’s official
view, as it were. In social life there is no substance, only relations: no en-soi (‘in-
itself ’), only pour-autrui (‘for-others’). All meaning is diacritical. The idea that distaste
is prior to taste accords with this view, as does the statement that ‘it is not easy to
describe the “pure” gaze without also describing the naive gaze against which it
defines itself, and vice versa’ (my italics). Or again: ‘each life-style can only really be
conceived in relation to the other, which is its objective and subjective negation’ (my
italics). In both these passages it is clearly stated that popular taste can only be
understood in opposition to refined or bourgeois taste – and vice versa.

However, there is also in Bourdieu’s thinking an idea that is at variance with the
official view: viz. that the working class is en-soi whereas the other classes define
themselves in opposition to each other and to the working class. Bourdieu at one
point observes that ‘confronted with legitimate works of art, the people least
endowed with specific competence apply to them the perceptual schemes of their
ethos, the same ones which structure their everyday experience of everyday existence.
These schemes, giving rise to products with an unwilled, unself-conscious
systematicity, are opposed to the more or less fully stated principles of an aesthetic.’
In a footnote he adds: ‘The populist image of the proletarian as an opaque, dense,
hard “in-itself ”, the perfect antithesis of the intellectual or aesthete, a self-
transparent, insubstantial “for-itself ”, has some basis here.’ He also notes that,
compared to the petty bourgeoisie, ‘the working classes ... are not concerned in this
way with their being for others.’ And again: ‘the working classes .. . have as perhaps
their only function in the system of aesthetic attitudes to serve as a foil, a negative
reference point, in relation to which all aesthetics define themselves, by successive
negations.’ The working classes are what they are; the petty-bourgeois are above all
not working-class and are also would-be bourgeois; the bourgeois are neither
working-class nor petty-bourgeois.

Finally, there is a third view which ascribes both to the working class and to the
bourgeoisie the mode of existence of the en-soi, while arguing that the être-pour-autrui
is above all characteristic of the petty bourgeoisie. Bourdieu repeatedly invokes
Berkeley’s ‘To be is to be perceived’ as a description of the petty bourgeoisie, opposed
in this respect not only to the working class, but also to ‘the members of the
privileged classes who, being sure of what they are, can be indifferent to what they
seem.’ On this view the idea of distinction applies to the petty bourgeoisie alone: the
other classes only differ objectively from one another. One may, therefore,
characterise what I have called the official view as a generalisation to all classes of the
specifically petty-bourgeois attitude to the world. If in Bourdieu’s universe everybody
is spending his time looking over his shoulder, it is because everybody is conceived
on the model of the petty bourgeoisie.

To be sure, Bourdieu has an answer to this objection. He would say that the
distinction can be objective as well as subjective, and that a non-subjective distinction
is yet more than a mere difference: in fact, he argues that sometimes it is crucial that
the distinction be not intentionally and consciously sought as such. However, the
difference (or distinction?) between a non-subjective distinction and a mere
difference can be upheld only if one can show that the objective taste differences are
shaped by the differential rewards which they procure for the members of the relevant
classes. If Bourdieu were able to demonstrate a causal mechanism to this effect, he
would be entitled to these ideas of ‘non-conscious strategies’ and ‘non-subjective
distinction’. But he does not have even the shadow of an argument to this effect.
Clearly, the way of life of the bourgeoisie is such as to make it difficult for an outsider
to pass for an insider; clearly again, this is useful for the bourgeoisie. But it is an
uncritical mind which then concludes that the bourgeois way of life can be explained
by its efficacy in keeping intruders out. Max Scheler writes in Ressentiment – with
Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, one of the main ancestors of La Distinction – that envy
arises when ‘our factual inability to acquire a good is wrongly interpreted as a positive
action against our desire.’ Bourdieu is engaged in a theoretical analogue of this
operation.

Bourdieu argues not only that distinction can be subjective as well as objective but –
inconsistently – that each of these modes is more efficacious than the other. In one
context he states that ‘genuinely intentional strategies ... merely ensure full efficacy, by
intentional reduplication, for the automatic, unconscious effects of the dialectic of the
rare and the common, the new and the dated, which is inscribed in the objective
differentiation of class conditions and dispositions’ (my italics). But later on,
observing that violations of grammar can be used to defend the superior culture
against would-be intellectuals, he adds: ‘Such strategies – which may be perfectly
unconscious, and thereby even more effective – are the ultimate riposte to the hyper-
correction strategies of pretentious outsiders, who are thrown into self-doubt about
the rule and the right way to conform to it, paralysed by a reflexiveness which is the
opposite of ease, and left without a leg to stand on’ (my italics). The last claim,
incidentally, shows Bourdieu at his not infrequent worst; it is a perfect illustration of
the fallacy denounced by Scheler. My purpose in quoting it here is to demonstrate the
cavalier treatment of what should be a crucial issue of the theory, and Bourdieu’s
ability to contradict himself within the space of a few pages.

Bourdieu’s main goal is ‘a materialist reduction of preferences to their economic and

social conditions of production and to the social functions fulfilled by the most
disinterested practices’. The phrase suggests two distinct ways of accomplishing this
reduction. First, there is the functional explanation of preferences in terms of their
consequences. Secondly, Bourdieu seems to suggest a causal explanation of
preferences in terms of social background. The crucial notion in this context is that of
amor fati, or ‘virtue made of necessity’: people like what they can afford. Let me
discuss this second approach in more detail, and then offer my argument that these
two modes of explanation are incompatible.

By way of introduction, it should be said that any action may be seen as the result of
choice within constraints. The constraints represent the element of necessity, the choice
the element of freedom in the action. Even though the choice may be said to be
‘governed’ by preference or taste, we do not conceive of this relation as a compulsive
one. The choice is more, not less, free by virtue of being ‘in character’. Such, at any
rate, is the standard view of human action underlying most of economics and recent
analytical philosophy. I believe it to be broadly valid, but in need of important
modifications. First, there may be an element of freedom in the set of constraints, if
they have been deliberately chosen and shaped by the agent. Ulysses bound to the
mast was constrained, but the constraint stemmed from his free choice. Secondly,
there may be an element of necessity in the preference structure, if tastes are shaped
by the constraints, as in the story of the fox and the sour grapes. These two
modifications work in opposite directions, the first tending to extend the realm of
liberty and the second to restrict it. For myself, I think both lines of argument valid
and important. That Bourdieu, however, is hostile to the idea that men can follow
Ulysses and shape their constraints is made clear in Le Sens Pratique; and La Distinction
argues at some length that preferences are indeed shaped by necessity.

Once again, Bourdieu lapses into ambiguity. He suggests that the idea of amor fati
applies mainly to the working class, and indeed his chapter on that class is called ‘Le
Choix du Nécessaire’. However, he also claims very generally that ‘the true source of
preferences is taste as a virtue made of necessity,’ and that ‘taste is the form par
excellence of amor fati.’ And he certainly wants to be able to apply the Sour Grapes
principle to his fellow intellectuals:

Not one of the professors’ choices (their preference for a harmonious, sober, discreet
interior, for example, or for simple but agreeably presented meals) but can be
understood as a way of making a virtue of necessity by maximising the profit they can
draw from their cultural capital and their spare time (while minimising their financial
expenditure). If the bourgeois never have the tastes to match their means, the professors
hardly ever have the money to match their tastes, and the disparity between economic
capital and cultural capital condemns them to an ascetic aestheticism (a more austere
version of the ‘artist’ life-style), which makes the best of what it has, substituting ‘rustic’
for antique, Romanian carpets for Persian carpets, a converted barn for an ancestral
mansion, lithographs (or reproductions) for paintings – unavowed substitutes which,
like poorer people’s Babycham and leatherette, are the tributes deprivation pays to
possession.

The passage is richly inconsistent, but I will say only that Bourdieu offers no evidence
that professors actually prefer Romanian carpets to Persian ones, which is what
would be required by the notion of amor fati. In fact, by saying that they do not have
‘the money to match their tastes’, he implies that they do prefer the carpets which
they cannot afford. It boils down to the fact that professors buy the carpets they can
afford rather than the ones they cannot – an observation that could not possibly
sustain the idea that in buying Romanian carpets the professors are paying homage
to the possessors of Persian carpets. Bourdieu is unable to make use of the valuable
idea of ‘virtue made of necessity’, since he does not see that its cutting edge depends
on the deprived actually preferring what little they can get to what is outside their
grasp. His own generalised notion of Sour Grapes – you can only get what you can
afford – enables him to explain all choices as born of necessity, but in a completely
trivial way.

The basic difficulty with the principle of Sour Grapes, in any case, is that it is hard to
 see how it can be reconciled with the principle of Distinction. Symbolic action in
Bourdieu’s view is explained twice over: first as the result of an insidious adaptation
to necessity, and then as quasi-strategic and goal-directed behaviour. Once again I am
reminded of Leibniz, who wrote that in nature generally, ‘ce sont comme deux Règnes, l’un
des Causes Efficientes, l’autre des Finales, dont chacun suffit à part dans le détail pour rendre raison
de tout, comme si l’autre n’existait point.’ But without a transcendent creator as the
guarantor of this pre-established harmony, we have no reason to believe that
everything can be explained twice over.

There is one interpretation that would make Bourdieu more consistent, while also
violating some of his explicit statements. One might argue that working-class
preferences are to be understood according to the principle of Sour Grapes, whereas
non-working-class taste obeys the principle of Distinction. In ‘Condition de Classe et send letters to
Position de Classe’, an article, published in 1966 in Archives Européennesde Sociologie, which
already sketched the main argument of La Distinction, Bourdieu came close to The Editor
adopting this view, when arguing that the behaviour of the ‘sous-prolétaires’ can be London Review of Books
28 Little Russell Street
explained by reference to their class condition, while that of the middle classes can only London, WC1A 2HN
be understood through their class position. In La Distinction, however, he claims
complete generality for both mechanisms, and this can only lead to inconsistency. letters@lrb.co.uk

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