Scholarship with Commitment: On the Political

Engagements of Pierre Bourdieu

Franck Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo

I run the risk of shocking those [researchers] who, opting for the cozy virtuousness
of confinement within their ivory tower, see intervention outside the academic
sphere as a dangerous failing of that famous “axiological neutrality” that is wrongly
equated with scientific objectivity. . . . But I am convinced that we must at all costs
bring the achievements of science and scholarship into public debate, from which
they are tragically absent.
Pierre Bourdieu, Preface to Contre-feux 2

Pierre Bourdieu’s interventions since the mass strikes and demonstrations that
rocked France in December of 1995 have been the object of oft-violent condem-
nations by the Parisian journalists and media intellectuals whose power he merci-
lessly dissected in his writings on television and journalism. Bourdieu was widely
accused by established newspaper writers of “coming late” to political action and
of abusing his scientific renown. But the sociologist’s engagements with political
issues date from his entry into intellectual life, in the 1960s during the Algerian
War of Independence.1 Since then, continual reflection on the “social conditions
of possibility” of his civic interventions has led him to separate himself as much
from pedantic scientism as from blind faith in political spontaneity, still much in
evidence among “free intellectuals.”
Taken as a whole, Bourdieu’s trajectory recounts the genesis of a specifically
political mode of intervention in which social science and civic activism, far from
being opposed, can be construed as the two faces of the same coin of analysis
and critique of social reality aimed at contributing to its transformation. It is a
trajectory that illustrates how sociology itself is enriched by political engagement
and reflection on the social and intellectual conditions of this engagement:

The time has come to transcend the old alternative of utopianism and sociologism
in order to propose sociologically-based utopias. For this social scientists would
have to succeed in collectively exploding the censorship they feel obliged to impose
on themselves in the name of a truncated idea of scientificity. . . . The social sciences
have purchased their access to the status of a science (in any case always disputed)
by a formidable renunciation: through a self-censorship that constitutes a veritable
self-mutilation, sociologists – myself for one, who have often denounced the temptation
of prophetism and social philosophy – have made themselves refuse all attempts to

Constellations Volume 11, No 1, 2004. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
 Scholarship with Commitment: Franck Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo 77

propose an ideal and global representation of the social world as failings of scientific
ethics liable to discredit their author.2

This manner of intervening into public debate implies the construction of another
point of view on politics:

We live immersed in politics. We bathe in the immutable and changing stream of

everyday chatter on the relative chances and merits of interchangeable candidates.
We do not need to read the daily or weekly columnists or their books of essays that
bloom at election time and go on to join the yellowed stock of used book dealers,
fare for the historians of ideas, after a brief stint on the bestseller lists: on every
radio and every television station their authors offer us “ideas” that are only so easy
to receive because they are “received ideas,” preconceived notions in everyone’s
mind. Everything can be said and said again indefinitely, since in fact nothing is
ever said. And our appointed debaters, who meet at the appointed hour to debate the
strategy of such-and-such politician, the image or the silences of such-and-such
another, tell the truth of the whole game when they express their hope that their
interlocutor will not be in agreement “so there can be a debate.” Their talk of
politics, like small talk about rain and good weather, is by nature vaporous, and
continuous forgetting, which enables us to avoid discovering its extraordinary
monotony, is what allows the game to go on.3

The sociologist thus finds himself in conflict not only with the professionals of
the electoral realm (elected officials, party leaders and spokesperson, trade union
delegates, etc.), but also with the professional political analysts and the semi-
scholarly discourse on the res publica – those whom Bourdieu (1972) called the
“doxosophists”: political journalists, media intellectuals, and assorted essayists. If
it is necessary on his view to break with this prefabricated discourse, it is not only
because of its “scientific mistakes” but also because of the commonplaces and
mystifications they introduce into public debate. Needless to say, the rigorous
sociological critique of their social function constitutes a veritable “offence
against the norms of social decorum” since it entails transgressing “the sacred
frontier between culture and politics, pure thought and the triviality of the
agora.”4 In the final analysis, Bourdieu’s interventions reveal the “ill-intended
intention” of his work: to forge a sociology opposed

to the cautions of academic propriety, which is inclined to retreat toward tried and
tested objects [just as much as to] the false daring of essayism or the arrogant
carelessness of prophetism: rejecting the alternative in which those who prefer to be
wrong with Sartre than right with Aron, or vice versa, lock themselves, that of
sermonizing humanism taken for generosity and of disenchanted indifference
aspiring to lucidity, it aims to submit current issues [actualité], as much as possible,
to the ordinary exigencies of scientific knowledge.5

This will to “politicize things by subjecting them to science” and to “think pol-
itics without for that thinking politically” is manifest from Bourdieu’s youthful

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78 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004

works on Algerian society and history. And it is the whole of his sociology, as his
lifelong companion from those days Abdelmalek Sayad once noted, that “bears
the stamp of this first apprenticeship.”6

Colonial War and Revolutionary Consciousness

After a year of teaching philosophy in central France following his graduation
from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Pierre Bourdieu arrived in Algeria in 1955 to
do his military service. He then took up a post as assistant professor in philosophy
in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Algiers until April 1960, when the
procolonialist coup forced him into exile and Raymond Aron rescued him by
offering him a teaching position at the Sorbonne. During this turbulent period,
marked by the escalating conflict between the ascending Algerian nationalist
movement and the colonial authories, he undertook ethnological studies in
Kabylia and other war-torn regions under conditions his student and collaborator
Abdelmalek Sayad described as precarious and dangerous. What Bourdieu later
characterized as “the shock of Algeria”7 provoked him to write his first book, The
Algerians (1962 [1960]), “in an activist logic” – the American edition, published
by Beacon Press in 1962 with a preface by Aron, showed an Algerian flag on the
cover even though independence had not yet been proclaimed – illuminated by a
knowledge of Algerian reality that very few French intellectuals shared then.8
Bourdieu’s first two interventions in the public debate on the colonial war,
then France’s paramount political issue, were published in 1961 by the journal
Esprit and in 1962 by its rival Les Temps modernes – two of the most influential
intellectual publications of the day, though Bourdieu did not necessarily share
the orientation of either.9 Building on a full command of the historical and
ethnographic literature and drawing on the results of several months of fieldwork,
these texts sought to break with an apolitical use of ethnology by making it
an instrument of symbolic struggle. They analyzed the destructrive effects of
the colonial encounter by refusing “axiological neutrality” as a pretext for
disengagement.10
Rejecting both verbal radicalism and principled humanist condemnation,
which made the Algerian Revolution the object of abstract debates in the
metropole, the scientific yet engaged posture adopted by Bourdieu from the start
led him to analyze the conditions of access to revolutionary consciousness. He
saw the war as a crucible that revealed the latent relations of violence constitutive
of the colonial system: war does not oppose “enemies” so much as it simply
exposes the revolt of the dominated society against this structure of domination.
Neither a civil war nor a war between nations, the Algerian conflict does not
exhaust itself in the confrontation of one class against another because it takes
aim at the caste system as such – with arms that, for the first time, are not only
symbolic. According to Bourdieu, this “revolution” in turn revolutionizes the
society that produced it to the extent that it makes traditional ways lose the

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 Scholarship with Commitment: Franck Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo 79

character of naturalness that seemed inherently attached to them, and imposes on

all an uprooting that resembles the experience of the immigrant.
The transposition of ethnographic methods honed in colonial Algeria to the
study of French society, notably to the peasants of his native Béarn and to the
educational system, would transgress not only disciplinary boundaries but also
the mental barriers that a society erects against all self-examination. Bourdieu’s
early writings on Algeria thus afforded the young scholar much more than an
ethnological “detour”: they fostered a veritable conversion of his vision.

Education and the Legitimation of Domination

After a stint as an Assistant Professor at the University of Lille (1961–64),
Bourdieu returned to Paris as Director of Studies at the École pratique des hautes
études. There he took up the position of Secretary General of the Center for Euro-
pean Sociology (CSE), launched by Raymond Aron in 1960 with monies from
American foundations. During these years, a research group was formed that
undertook a range of studies on the educational system, intellectuals, and cultural
practices connected to museums and photography; several studies and collective
works were published during those years, the best-known being Photography: A
Middle-Brown Art and The Love of Art on social access to European museums.11
The year 1964 saw the creation of the series “Le sens commun” at Editions de
Minuit, in response to the need for an autonomous publishing structure whose
editorial policy would be at once scientifically ambitious and careful to escape
erudite confinement so as to open itself up to a larger readership. That same year
Bourdieu published The Inheritors with Jean-Claude Passeron – a book that
Raymond Aron would later describe as one of the catalysts of May ’68. During
the turmoil of May, Aron allowed the CSE to be the mailbox for the “Committee
for the Defense and Renewal of the French University,” a group of conservative
academics bent on defending the academic and social status quo in the face of
widening social protests. In reaction, a year later, Bourdieu set up a separate team
of researchers with their own program of investigations – the Center for the
Sociology of Education and Culture (CSEC).
The Center participated in its way in the events of May ’68. One of its major
interventions was an “Appeal for the Organization of Estates General for Education
and Research.” The idea of an “estates general,” taken up again thirty years later
in 1996 and 2000,12 referred to a collective way of claims-making that was not to
be confused with a “discussion among the beneficiaries of the system” and would
not replicate the exclusion of those who, eliminated from higher education, were by
definition deprived from the means of contesting its organization. In subsequent
years, Bourdieu returned to the crisis of the “university order” that had exploded
in 1968 and analyzed what had determined its limits: the reform of the most visibly
authoritarian aspects of the academic system did not make the authoritarian structure
of the “pedagogical relation” and its power to legitimate inequalities disappear.13

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80 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004

The spontaneity with which the “leaders of May” had spoken out must not
obscure the fact that the political positions defended by the students and lower-
ranking academics derived from their objective interests in the academic world.14
Much as the studies brought together in Academic Discourse: Linguistic
Misunderstanding and Professional Power show “the decisive role of linguistic
inheritance in academic success,”15 The Inheritors starts from the statistical
connection between social origin and rates of educational success to demonstrate
that the school system favors those who are best endowed with cultural capital by
virtue of their class background. The apparent neutrality of the school allows it to
convert social differences into academic differences by making properties
acquired in the bosom of the family pass for “natural gifts.” In a society where
obtaining social privileges depends increasingly on the possession of university
credentials, this ideology of the gift, whereby those who “inherit” become those
who “merit,” fulfills an essential legitimizing function for the social order. This
thesis, first stated in 1964 in The Inheritors, was elaborated both theoretically and
empirically in Reproduction. Upon its publication in 1970, this book was vigor-
ously attacked in the public sphere, including by left intellectuals, for its alleged
“fatalistic vision” of schools and society – for many school-trained scholars, its
questioning of the basis of their social privilege was not acceptable, nor was the
empirical deflation of the fashionable ideology of “emancipatory education.” It
was also during these years that a series of studies of the various Grandes écoles
(elite graduate schools in which entry is by national competitive examination) and
of the system they form were initiated within the CSE and then the CSEC. These
studies would lead to the publication in 1989 of The State Nobility, whose
prologue insists on the political import of the academic institution and therefore
of the sociology of education.16

Against the Science of Political Dispossession

In January 1971, Bourdieu gave a paper entitled “Public Opinion Does Not
Exist”17 which is foundational in several respects: its deconstruction of the
production of public opinion polls and critique of their social uses takes on at
once the researchers who conduct them and the politicians who turn them into
arguments of authority.18 Reckoning with non-responses to polls raises the
question of the competencies required to talk politically about politics and the
dispossession suffered by those who rely on mandated delegates to make their
political claims.19 The critique of the indiscriminate use of “public opinion” by
the discipline of political science constitutes, according to Bourdieu, a defense of
the autonomy of sociology at the very moment when researchers find themselves
increasingly subordinated to political and administrative demands, and dominated
by a pole of applied research whose main representative in the 1970s was Jean
Stoetzel, a social psychologist who had imported US-made survey techniques in
France.20

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 Scholarship with Commitment: Franck Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo 81

Bourdieu further elaborated the political foundations of his critique in a paper

delivered to the French Political Science Association in November 1973, where
he took up a distinction introduced by Emile Durkheim between an electoral out-
come that results from the mere addition of individual votes and one that
expresses “something collective.” Bourdieu’s central argument here is that “the
essential and most hidden principle of dispossession resides in the aggregation of
opinions.” What should command our attention is not the aggregate but the proc-
ess of aggregation, that is, the relationship between the opinion and the mode of
existence of the social group – which explains the importance of novel forms of
political demonstrations (sit-ins, boycotts, etc.) whereby mobilized groups resist
the dispossession of their voice. It was for these reasons that, from that moment
onward, Bourdieu deemed it necessary to forge an alliance between researchers
and activists. By uncovering the hidden springs of domination, scientific analysis
is capable of becoming an instrument of self-understanding and (relative) emanci-
pation on behalf of a social movement:

Liberal philosophy identifies political action with solitary, even silent and secret,
action, whose paradigm is voting, the “purchase” of a party offering in the secrecy
of the voting booth. In so doing, it reduces the group to the series, the mobilized
opinion of an organized or solidary collective to the statistical aggregation of
individually expressed opinions. One thinks of the utopia of Milton Friedman, who,
in order to capture the points of view of families on schooling, suggests distributing
tokens allowing them to buy educational services furnished by competing
enterprises. . . . Political action finds itself reduced to a form of economic action.
The logic of the market, or of voting, which is to say the aggregation of individual
strategies, imposes itself whenever groups are reduced to the state of aggregates –
or, if you prefer, whenever they are demobilized.21

The intellectual legitimacy that polling – “this science without scientists” – lends
to the mechanisms of domination was for Bourdieu the crux of his critique of the
“doxosophists,” the professional manufacturers of opinion who produce an
ideology conforming to the interests of the dominant.22 Political critique must
therefore be accompanied by a sociology of intellectuals wielded as a symbolic
weapon against pseudo-scholarly justifications of the social order:23

“Political-scientization” is one of the most effective techniques of depoliticization.

. . . [It] is one of the weapons in the struggle between the forces of depoliticization
and the forces of politicization, forces of subversion of the ordinary order and
adhesion to this order – whether it be the unselfconscious adhesion that defines
doxa or elective adhesion, which characterizes orthodoxy, opinion or right-thinking
and, if you like, thinking of the right.24

The critique of “political science” and of the “doxosophists” thus partakes of a

broader analysis of the threats that weigh on the autonomy of the intellectual field
in general, and on the sociological field in particular, in a period, the seventies,

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82 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004

during which many of France’s high-level state managers had put themselves at
the service of the “modernization” of French capitalism, that is, the revamping of
its symbolic mechanisms of reproduction. These transformations increased the
hold of political powers on the intellectual world: positioned midway between
intellectuals stripped of temporal power and men of power whose authority rests
increasingly on specific expertise, a new population of “administrative researchers”
and “scientific administrators” belonging to scholarly institutions directly answer-
ing to the dictates of the state had developed which acted as agents of heteronomy
inside of the scientific field itself.25
The launching of the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, whose
inaugural issue appeared in 1975, was intended to contribute to bolstering the
autonomy of sociology by providing it with an independent means of dissemin-
ation capable of reaching beyond the closed university milieu, yet subject only to
the necessities of procedures of empirical verification and scientific critique.
Animated by the will to break with academic formalism and the normalizing
standardization of social science research, its editorial line called for the juxtapos-
ition of “finished” scholarly articles, research notes, statistical documents,
photos, facsimiles, and even cartoons.26 This scientific policy for sociology
sought not only to “deconstruct” the “sacred” texts of the scholarly world, but
also “to destroy the false pretenses and evasions forged by a religious vision of
man, over which the revealed religions have no monopoly.” Effecting a “reversal
of the hierarchy of consecrated research objects” by a science traditionally so
dependent upon political demands as sociology, in which scientific censorship is
very often nothing but concealed political censorship, Actes de la recherche
endeavored to overturn the opposition between “the priesthood of the great
academic orthodoxy” and “the distinguished heresy of the sharp-shooters who
fire blanks.”27 The diversity of methods deployed in the journal thus joined a
variety of themes which even today are seldom considered worthy of full-fledged
sociological study: high fashion, the automobile, cartoons, vocational education,
the army, social workers, the rhetorics of Marxism, etc.

Political Disenchantment and the Realpolitik of Reason

On the threshold of the 1980s, texts published by Bourdieu on the political field
dissected the separation between political professionals and the politically
profane that reinforces the logic of the apparatus and leads to the closure of the
political world onto itself:

Silence about the conditions that place citizens, all the more brutally as they are
more economically and culturally deprived, before the alternative of resignation
through abstention or dispossession through delegation is to “political science”
what silence about the economic and cultural conditions of “rational” economic
conduct is to the science of economics. Any analysis of political struggle must take

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 Scholarship with Commitment: Franck Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo 83

as its foundation the economic and social determinants of the division of political
labor at its foundation, lest it naturalize the social mechanisms that produce and
reproduce the break between “politically active agents” and “politically passive
agents” [as Weber says] and constitutes into eternal laws historical regularities valid
within the limits of a determinate state of the structure of the distribution of capital,
and in particular of cultural capital.28

It was an international event that spectacularly revealed the consequences of

such closure of the national political field onto itself. In Poland, on the night of 12
December 1981, the troops of General Jaruzelski, supported by the USSR, moved
in on the Solidarnosc trade union and arrested many of its leaders. Faced with
France’s absence of official reaction to Jaruzelski’s subsequent declaration of a
state of siege, Bourdieu suggested that major public voices join to sign an appeal
to put pressure on the Socialist government to denounce Poland’s turn to Soviet-
style repression. He drew up the initial appeal with Michel Foucault. Meetings,
declarations, and demonstrations followed, provoking violent reactions on the
part of the Socialist government and its spokespersons suddenly faced with this
mode of “recalcitrant cooperation.”29
After he was elected to the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France in
1982, Bourdieu amplified his sociology of intellectuals with Homo Academicus,
which put forth a thorough analysis of the determinants of the political engage-
ments of scholars as sifted through the prism of their academic positions, trajecto-
ries, and strategies. Against the double bind constituted by the contestation of
academic hierarchies in the name of “democratization” and the defense of these
hierarchies in the name of the quality of teaching – “a pair of forces that encour-
age the status quo when it comes to what really matters” – the sociologist
affirmed the necessity of reexamining the place of scientific work in the univer-
sity, which the reforms of the day would not allow to be considered.30 Written
under the collective aegis of the Collège de France at the request of President
François Mitterrand, the report entitled “Propositions for an Education of the
Future” was for Bourdieu the occasion to fuse his scientific work on schooling
and his academic impulses rooted in his position as a “consecrated heretic.”31 The
report generated considerable public discussion but was swiftly tabled by a
Socialist government that had no intention of truly reforming education. But it
was translated and widely debated in several neighboring countries, where some
of its recommendations were put into practice. If Bourdieu later proved very
critical of the uses that were made of the report (it was reduced, in his eyes, to a
“little something extra in the ‘Letter from the President of the Republic to the
French people’” sent by Mitterrand to all French voters during the 1988 presidential
campaign), he nonetheless agreed in 1989 to preside over an official Commission
on the Contents of Education set up by Lionel Jospin, then-minister for education
in the government of Michel Rocard during the second Mitterrand presidency.32
The seven “Principles for a Reflection on the Content of Instruction” put forth by

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84 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004

the Gros-Bourdieu commission proposed restructuring the divisions of know-

ledge and the conditions of its transmission so as to enable pedagogy to reach a
broader spectrum of students. But again the relations of power inside the Socialist
government were such that it was left fallow.
Bourdieu’s participation in such government-sponsored commissions and
reports by no means prevented him from remaining attentive to the social move-
ments that were then shaking French schools and society. Indeed, the 1980s
witnessed the emergence of unconventional forms of protest – nurses’ actions in
1986, a teachers’ strike against the redistribution of power in primary schools in
1987, and several student mass protests. During the student mobilizations
Bourdieu gave an interview that provided him with an opportunity to criticize the
policies of the governments of both right and left and the absence of a political
project for a school system that had been handed over wholesale to the neoliberal
ideology of competition.33
These perspectives on current politics – state expertise and social movements –
run through the analysis of the structure and functioning of the “field of power”
set out in 1989 in The State Nobility: struggles among the dominant over the con-
servation or transformation of elite academic institutions entrusted with the
“reproduction of the field of power” both express and mask a struggle over
control of the state as the ultimate “bank of symbolic power.” But at the same
time these struggles paradoxically “inject into the field of power a little of that
universal – reason, disinterestedness, civic-mindedness, etc. – that, issued from
earlier struggles, is always a symbolically effective weapon in the struggles of the
moment.”34 Yet this gradual and irregular “progress toward the universal” does
not fill the gap between, on the one hand, the state bureaucracy (whose legitimacy
resides in the possession of academic credentials) and political professionals
(who govern “with an eye trained on public opinion polls”) and, on the other,
those who “protest outside the established frameworks” – to whom the interviews
and analyses presented in The Weight of the World would later be devoted with
the intention of inciting “another way of doing politics.”35 Appearing in 1993,
this thousand-page collective dissection of new forms “social misery” in French
society quickly became a reference work for social activists and achieved
enormous public success – it has sold nearly 100,000 copies and was adapted for
the theater as well as video.
Bourdieu’s Postscript to The Weight of the World directly addresses the closing
onto itself of the political microcosm and its disregard for the coarse realities of the
social world. Its title seemed to critically echo Prime Minister Michel Rocard, who,
under electoral pressure from the extreme-right Front National on the “immigration
problem,” had declared in Le Monde on 24 August 1990: “France cannot accommo-
date all the misery of the world [la misère du monde, the book’s title in French –
tr.], but it should know to shoulder its part of the burden faithfully.”
Contrary to a common misreading, such analyses of the changing forms and
modalities of the exercise of power in advanced societies do not lead to passivity

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or resignation. If social groups have worked to establish the rule of law, the idea
of public service, the general interest, it is because they have found the benefits of
universalization.36 For Bourdieu, an effective and realistic politics must thus
consist in enlarging this principle of “interest in the universal” to other social
universes and in inventing institutional structures such that political agents
acquire an interest in pursuing virtuous strategies benefiting the citizenry at large:

Political ethics cannot fall from heaven: it is not inscribed in human nature. Only a
Realpolitik of reason and morality can contribute to fostering the institution of uni-
verses wherein all social agents would be subjected – in particular through the
agency of critique – to a kind of permanent test of universality. . . . [M]orality has no
chance of coming about, especially in politics, unless one works to create the
institutional means for a policy of morality. The official truth of the official, the cult
of public service and of devotion to the commonweal, cannot resist the critique of
suspicion that everywhere uncovers corruption, misplace ambition, clientelism, or,
in the best-case scenario, a vested interest in serving the public good.37

The role of social critique proves crucial in forcing political leaders to be what
their social function enjoins them to be, that is, to reduce the “gap between the
official and the effective” and “create the conditions for the institution of the rule
of civic virtue.”38 However, this critique of electoral politics and state bureaucracies
does not lead merely to revealing the social suffering engendered by neoliberal
policies implemented by the left itself.39 In Bourdieu’s work it comes along with
a continual reflection on the social and political conditions of the political action
of intellectuals, whose autonomy is threatened by the hold of a “technocracy of
communication” that reinforces the monopoly of political professionals over public
debate.

Waging Struggles at the European Level: Reinventing a Collective

Intellectual
As international equilibria are overturned by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the
construction of the European Union, for Bourdieu the struggles of intellectuals
must more than ever be collective and international. In this perpective, the launch-
ing of the journal Liber represented an attempt to reactivate at the European level
the tradition of the intellectual on the model of the Enlightenment encyclopé-
distes. As early as 1985 Bourdieu had formulated the premises of this enterprise
within the framework of the College of European Artists and Scholars, where he
had envisioned the creation of a European Review of Books in which intellectuals
could assert their specific norms, over and against the twin pressures of the mar-
ket and the national state. The first ambition of Liber, an “international review of
books,” was to diffuse avant-garde literary, artistic, and scientific works to a
broad transnational audience by thwarting the self-enclosure of these worlds and
“overcoming the temporal gaps and misunderstandings tied to linguistic barriers,

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the slowness of translations, . . . and the inertia of academic traditions.”40 The

journal was first distributed as a quarterly supplement to major national dailies in
several countries. In France, Le Monde was its first support but when the news-
paper sought to gain control over content, Bourdieu took Liber back and made it a
companion to Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Until its closing in
1999, the journal steadfastly went against the current of “the undiscussed beliefs
of academic orthodoxy, so powerful in these times of restoration.”41
The editorial line of Liber was distinctive in the place it gave to artists and
writers whose works are vectors of political critique. The collapse of the USSR,
the fall of the Berlin Wall, the foibles of nationalism, and the reunification of
Germany were among the journal’s privileged themes. In some of the first issues,
Jürgen Habermas analyzed the noxious effects of the reunification process;42
Bourdieu returned to the crumbling of Sovietism and the grim realities of the
functioning of a regime that betrayed the emancipatory project it initially bore,
and to the “false alternatives” (socialism versus liberalism) utilized on behalf of
political restoration. The aim of the journal on these and other topics of wide civic
concern was to use history, sociology, and literature as instruments of collective
self-knowledge in order to check the regressive impulses that often underlie the
political actions of artists, scholars, and philosophers. The collective socioanaly-
sis Bourdieu called for aims to detect the traps that history has bequeathed and
sedimented in common language; its purpose is to enable us to gain degrees of
freedom by opening the way to a realistic internationalism that would overcome
the obstacles inherited from past national conflicts and establish structures of
communication liable to foster the institution of the universal.
This Realpolitik of reason inspired the call for a “corporatism of the universal,”
first given as a lecture in 1989 in Milan and later rewritten into the conclusion of
The Rules of Art (1992). For Bourdieu it was again a question of reinforcing the
autonomy of the intellectual field that was constructed at the end of the nineteenth
century against religious, political, and economic powers – an autonomy now
threatened by the increasing interpenetration of the worlds of art and money, the
generalized recourse to private sponsors to finance scientific research, and the
growing weight of commercial constraints on enterprises of cultural production
and dissemination. New forms of struggle therefore have to be invented, such as
the “International of the Intellectuals” to which Bourdieu devoted himself in the
first half of the 1990s. Establishing such a “critical counter-power” by organizing
“a concrete solidarity with threatened writers” and establishing “a locus for
reflection on new forms of engagement”: such was the object of the appeal
delivered in Strasbourg in November 1993, initiated by Bourdieu and signed by
Jacques Derrida, Édouard Glissant, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, and Salman
Rushdie, for the creation of an International Parliament of Writers. In February
1994, Rushdie was elected to the presidency of the new group, which acquired a
deliberative and executive body composed of fifty members, and a charter defin-
ing the organization’s principles, obligations, and forms of action: independence

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from established power, recognition of the diversity of historical traditions in

order to escape the “prophetism of the old universal conscience” denouncing the
“major issues of the hour” as defined by the media, anonymous and collective
contributions, etc. Among the achievements of the IPW, one notes the creation of
a network of 400 safe havens (spread across 34 countries) and the organization of
international press conferences about Rwanda, Algeria, Sarajevo, asylum rights,
etc. It was an ambitious project, within which Bourdieu nonetheless oppposed to
“‘figure of the intellectual as the self-proclaimed bearer of universal conscience’
that, construed as much more modest, of ‘functionary of humanity’” (an expression
he borrowed from Edmund Husserl).43
Two initiatives launched at the beginning of the 1990s on issues of higher
education and Algeria allowed Bourdieu to put his conception of the collective
work of intellectuals into practice. In March 1992, an appeal to the research and
teaching community led to the creation of a collective, the Association for Reflec-
tion on Higher Education and Research (Association de Réflexion Sur les
Enseignements Supérieurs et la Recherche, ARESER), with Bourdieu acting as
president and historian Christophe Charle as secretary. Against the dysfunctions
of the bureaucratic decision-making process, and especially the loss of control
and authority by specialists who let “scientific administrators” set the objectives
and modalities of teaching, the ARESER collected documents, organized debates,
and produced texts aimed at establishing rigorous “diagnoses and urgent remedies
for a university in peril” – as indicated by the title of the first work published by
the collective in 1997.44
Cast as the “extreme limit of all the social and political problems that a
researcher and intellectual can encounter,” the resurging Algerian predicament
became for Bourdieu the focus of collective work with the International Committee
of Support for Algerian Intellectuals (Comité International de Soutien aux Intel-
lectuels Algériens, or CISIA), created in June 1993 to aid scholars, journalists,
teachers, and writers who have been the object of attacks and assassinations since
the outbreak of the Algerian civil war. In connection with the International
Parliament of Writers, the CISIA sought first of all to facilitate the exile of the
most threatened intellectuals and then to counter the isolation of those cut off
from all information by the violence. It set as its objective alerting public opinion,
in “total independence from governments, institutions, and parties,” to the assault
on lives and liberties under way in Algeria, and it took a public position in favor
of a “party of civil peace” toward which the November 1995 presidential
elections that brought Liamine Zeroual to power would later seem to be leading.
But the CISIA also aimed, against the “cold political analysis” and the “indecent
humanist preaching” of media intellectuals,45 to provide tools for understanding
the present situation, in particular by showing that “Islam is not, by nature,
incompatible with the rule of law.”46 Against the collective repression rooted in
the colonial heritage, a work of recovery of the country’s “historical uncon-
scious” shows that the collective lie of the Algerian ruling class, together with the

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regression to barbarism for which France furnished the model during the Algerian
War of Independence, finds its roots in the colonial era in the structural subordin-
ation of culture to politics. The texts produced by Bourdieu on this issue thus
costantly reaffirm the need to establish basic political and cultural liberties, all the
while criticizing the measures of the French government restricting immigration
from its former colony.47

In Support of Social Movements: From December ’95 to Raisons d’agir

A catalyst for resistance to the spread of neoliberal policies, the social movement
of December 1995 resulted from the conjunction of several crises: a student
protest that started in November and was soon joined by the mobilization of
activist networks in higher education; a public transit strike in response to the
announcement of a government plan of reduction of rail service and a reform of
the railroad employees retirement system, which contributed to blocking traffic
and the activities of large towns and cities; and finally, after the November 15
announcement of a plan to curtail national health and social protection schemes
which mandated the reduction of public expenditures, the development of
widespread popular protest against the Juppé government.48 Faced with these
mobilizations, the directors of the Saint-Simon Foundation and the Catholic-
center-left journal Esprit launched a public petition drive in support of the
governmental measures,49 “For a Reform of the Social Security Fund,” condemning
both the alleged archaism of the medical coverage system and those who rejected
Juppé’s plan for welfare retrenchment.
In support of the strikers, Bourdieu joined in writing a major call for an initiative
by academics close to activist circles that appeared in Le Monde on 5 December
as mass protest was starting to build up.50 The December 12 demonstration, in
which nearly two million marched in the streets of France, ended with a public
meeting at the Gare de Lyon during which the sociologist stepped to the fore to
defend public services threatened by neoliberal policies of state retrenchment and
commodification of public services. In his speech before throngs of railroad
workers, striking wage earners, and other activists, Bourdieu denounced the
action of a “state nobility which preaches the withering away of the state and the
undivided reign of the market and the consumer.”51 Against the experts who
called on the authority of the lofty science of economics to justify draconian cuts
in welfare, Bourdieu affirmed his support for those whom the technocratic elites
disparaged as a people dominated by irrational and insatiable “desires” to whom
rational policies have to dictated from above – as suggested by, among others,
philosopher Paul Ricoeur and sociologist Alain Touraine.52
The successive French governments of the nineties thus became the direct
object of Bourdieu’s critical analyses. The targets of his interventions included
immigration policy, with the infamous “Pasqua-Debré laws” which authorized
racial and ethnic profiling in police and administrative processing; the refusal to

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regularize undocumented aliens, which in 1996 gave rise to an important grass-

roots mobilization in direct continuity with the December 1995 movement; the
left’s silence in the struggle of homosexuals for full civil equality; and the media
operations launched by Socialist Minister of Education Claude Allègre to hide the
pro-market bent of his policies. Bourdieu tried to bring the full weight of his
scientific renown, often in association with other leading intellectuals, in support
of activists situated at the avant garde of protest53 as well as those who, after the
return of the Socialists to government in 1997, saw the policies of the newly
formed Jospin government as a betrayal the ideals of the left. In January 1998,
Bourdieu intervened publicly in favor of the movement of the unemployed,
whose forms of direct action, initiated by a cadre of activists, captured media
attention. The occupation of the Ecole Normale Supérieure – France’s traditional
breeding ground of top intellectuals and Bourdieu’s own alma mater – gave him
an opportunity to emphasize the “social miracle” of the mobilization of those who
tend to be atomized and disorganized by their situation of economic exclusion
and social detachment.54 Support of the cause of the unemployed allowed the
denunciation of the generalized precariousness brought on by neoliberal policy:
the “objective insecurity” that affects the world of labor is the basis of the
“subjective insecurity” that affects those employed no less than those pushed out
of the wage-labor sphere and fosters the implementation of flexibility as the basis
for a new mode of economic domination.55
Beyond these specific intercessions into public debate, Bourdieu sought to
make a lasting mark by shaping the organizational form and means of intellec-
tual action. While the initiative of the Estates General of the Social Movement
did not really lead to significant results after 1996, it put Bourdieu’s notion of
the “collective intellectual” into action by bringing together researchers with
similar civic orientations. Thus was Raisons d’agir [Reasons to Act] created, a
collective intended to place the analytical expertise of social scientists and other
scholars at the service of movements opposing neoliberal policies and to coun-
terbalance the influence of the conservative think-tanks then mushrooming
throughout Europe. Relying on the public success of The Weight of the World
and the collective work that fed it, this group composed mainly of sociologists,
historians, and economists close to Pierre Bourdieu sought to engage as such in
the symbolic struggles against the imposition of a neoliberal doxa by experts,
especially mainline economists. Sociological work, which makes visible that
which escapes the ordinary perception of the social world, thus serves as a basis
for the collective’s political interventions in the press and through conferences,
public debates, and publications. To diffuse “intellectual weapons of resist-
ance,” Bourdieu also created a publishing house, Liber-Raisons d’agir, to put
out a series of low-cost books intended to offer works of engaged social science
to a broad educated public in an accessible form, as well as analyses censored
or marginalized by the dominant media – starting with those dealing with the
media itself.

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Among the first titles in a series that has taken a prominent place in public
debate since its launch are Bourdieu’s On Television (1996) and Les Nouveaux
chiens de garde (The New Watchdogs, 1997) by Serge Halimi, a journalist at Le
Monde diplomatique who holds a Berkeley PhD in political science. The sales of
the former exceeded 150,000 copies while those of The New Watchdogs (a direct
reference to Julien Benda’s famous 1930s broadside Les Chiens de garde)
reached 100,000 copies in less than six months in spite of the complete blackout
in which the mainstream media kept the volume. These books began to spread a
critique of the journalistic field that extended empirical analysis carried out by
Bourdieu and his collaborators many years earlier.

Resisting the Neoliberal Counterrevolution: The Media at the Service of the

“Conservative Revolution”
Bourdieu’s first works on the emergence of “journalist-intellectuals” date from
the mid-seventies and his fuller analysis of the submission of journalism to the
pressures of the market from the eighties.56 On the occasion of a debate reflecting
back on the coverage of the the 1991 Gulf War, the journalists of Reporters sans
frontières (Journalists Without Borders) invited the sociologist who proceeded to
dissect their unconscious and often unseen contribution to the naturalization of
the dominant vision of the social world; a major newsmagazine echoed the meet-
ing and broadcast Bourdieu’s analysis. But the appearance of On Television in
1996 sparked a vitriolic media campaign against the sociologist, mobilizing the
largest national dailies and weeklies for several months, during which period the
book topped the bestseller list.57 The sociological analysis of the constraints
weighing on journalistic work – urgency, consensus, mandatory cross-reference
to the work of rivals, etc. – reveals how the growing subjection of the media to
the exigencies of the audimat (the French equivalent of the Nielsen ratings)
contributes to the ambiant “political disenchantment.” But whereas Bourdieu’s
scientific texts had been relatively little read, On Television broke the barrier of
scholarly esotericism and put a sociological understanding of the media in the
hands of a broad audience. Besides the paradoxical “publicity” effects engen-
dered by the violence of the concerted attacks launched on Bourdieu by France’s
leading columnists, the impact of the publications by Raisons d’agir can be
explained by the resurgence of social struggles as well as by the increasing
attention directed toward the decline of professional standards and pressure of
commercialism among the French national media.
Political disenchantment, marketing methods, and submission to the competi-
tive market were all themes that motivated Bourdieu’s fall 1999 participation in
an action, initiated by ACRIMED (an association formed by scholars and
activists devoted to the critique and democratization of the mass media), to
defend France Culture (the French equivalent of PBS), which had just been
subjected to a programming reform based on “‘recipes’ believed to have made for

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the success of public and private stations” but which have transformed public
radio into a “barely disguised” instrument “for the promotion of the most
commercially-oriented books, records, and films.”58 The sociologist’s attention to
the operation of the mainstream public media at the service of market thinking came
above all from the fact that this constitutes an obstacle to progressive struggles:

One of the major obstacles to the constitution of forces of resistance is the fact that
the dominant control the media as never before in history. . . . Nowadays, all the
large French newspapers are completely controlled. Even papers that maintain the
appareance of independence, like Le Monde, are in fact shareholder associations
ruled by moneyed interests.59

Beyond the critique of the media, it is the social movement as an “international of

resistance to neoliberalism and to all forms of conservatism” that is the basis of
all the questions Bourdieu addresses to the “masters of the world, [holders of]
these new powers born of the conjugated forces of money and the media.”60
Engaged with the international swirl of the neoliberal counterrevolution
seeking to put the economy in power everywhere, Bourdieu supplemented his
analyses of the social effects of economic logics with a sociology of the social
and political foundations of the economy. In The Social Structures of the
Economy (2000), the sociologist gathers and reworks various strands of a large-
scale study of France’s single-home market conducted in the early 1990s. The
book joins a historical analysis of how the French state constructed and then
reshaped the housing market after the 1970s with the elaboration of “principles
for an economic anthropology” arraigned against the “ahistorical vision of the
science of economics.”61 Alongside this exploration of the political making of
capitalist economic institutions, the sociologist refined his earlier analyses of the
“social genesis of the economic habitus” in the colonial society of Algeria and the
dangers of the “scholastic fallacy” in the analysis of economic behavior – themes
that run through his texts on the “economy of practices” since his first critique of
structuralism formulated in his study of the strategies of peasants of Béarn,62 first
formalized in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972) and then taken up again in
The Logic of Practice (1980), before making way for a full-blown critique of
scholastic reason in Pascalian Meditations (1997).
Faced with the constitution of a global economic space unified according to the
logic of capital concentration conforming to the interests of the “conservative
international of the top executives and managers of multinational corporations”
(and relayed by the actions of international institutions such as the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization), Bourdieu
expressed public support for various movements mobilizing against neoliberal
globalization during the mass demonstrations of Nice (December 2000) and
Québec City (April 2001). The relative success of these struggles did not prevent
him from staying alert to other international opportunities for intervention within

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collective frameworks. He frontally challenged the complicitous silence of

national and international authorities in light of the “bloodbath” authorized and
even fomented by the upper echelons of the Algerian army and state, and he
supported initiatives against the wars that punctuated the nineties in the Gulf and
then the Balkans. These stances should be seen within the framework of
Bourdieu’s analyses of an international situation in which “the global community
has given carte blanche to the United States to enforce a particular kind of order”
wherein “relations of force overwhelmingly favor the dominant” and “might
alone makes right.”63 For the sociologist, that such transnational balance of
power can be presented as a natural necessity is the result of “twenty years of
work by conservative think-tanks and their allies in the political and journalistic
fields,” who have invented a “new planetary vulgate” whose intentions and
impact on collective consciousness urgently need to be unmasked.64
It was, however, at the European level that Bourdieu located the privileged
ground for a renewal of civic struggles, to which he devoted an article that
appeared in Le Monde diplomatique in June 1999 criticizing the fact that the con-
struction of Europe is “so far little more than [a work of] social destruction.”65
The “Appeal for Estates General of the European Social Movement,” symbolically
published on 1 May 2000 (international Labor Day) in several major European
and Latin American dailies simultaneously, constituted another initiative to try
and regroup anti-capitalist activists at the European level in a structure similar to
the French social movements of the nineties, characterized, according to
Bourdieu, by the rejection of traditional forms of political mobilization – an
influence of the self-management movement favoring grassroots participation
and privileging direct action.66
Founded on the stern rejection of any political cooptation of the libertarian
tradition of the left that was reactivated by the “Appeal for the Autonomy of the
Social Movement,”67 Bourdieu’s interventions during the closing years of the
1990s have consistently intended to spur political action backed by practical
activist knowledge and to foster the emergence of a coordinating committee
aticulating the diverse social movements and unions of Europe that would escape
the hold – and also the compromises – of institutions for which the European
Trade Union Confederation supplies the model. To this end, the meetings with
trade union leaders, activists, and progressive intellectuals held in Vienna in
November 2000 and Athens in May 2001 aimed at instituting a form of political
work intent on escaping the logics of both the political meeting and the academic
conference.
This compressed recapitulation spanning three decades shows that Pierre
Bourdieu’s political interventions cannot be separated from his scientific
writings, even if the reading of his works has too often been neutralized by their
academic conditions of reception.68 For they effectively put his sociological
thought in practice by way of analyses, speeches, interviews, and occasional texts
that oftentimes reemerge later in books in a more elaborate and “scholarly” form.

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Resituating the engagements of the sociologist in their historical and intellectual

contexts thus leads not only to displacing the boundary between scientific
research and political action. It also reveals the work of controled conversion of
social pulsion into critical intellectual impulsion that endows sociology with the
epistemological vigilance necessary to break with the preconstructed social and
political problems of “current affairs.”

(Translated by James Ingram and Loïc Wacquant)

NOTES

1. These interventions are collected in Pierre Bourdieu, Interventions, 1961–2001. Science

sociale et action politique, ed. Franck Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo (Marseilles: Agone, 2002)
[Tr.: translations have been cited where possible along with original date of publication].
2. Bourdieu, “Monopolisation politique et révolutions symboliques” (1990) in Propos sur le
champ politique (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2000).
3. Bourdieu, “Penser la politique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 71/72 (March
1988): 2–3.
4. Ibid.
5. Bourdieu, “La science et l’actualité,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 61 (March 1986):
2–3.
6. Abdelmalek Sayad, interview published in MARS 6 (1996).
7. Bourdieu, “Tout est social,” interview with P.-M. de Baisi, Magazine littéraire 303 (October
1992): 104–11.
8. Bourdieu, “Entre amis,” Awal 21 (2000): 5–10.
9. Bourdieu, “Révolution dans la revolution,” Esprit 1 (January 1961): 27–40 and “The Algerian
subproletariat,” in Ira William Zartman, ed., Men, State and Society in the Contemporary Mahgreb
(London: Praeger, 1973 [Les Temps modernes 1962]). Along with these texts, Bourdieu published
other articles in more academic journals, such as “Guerre et mutation sociales en Algérie,” Études
méditerranéennes 7 (Spring 1960): 25–37 and “La hantise du chômage chez l’ouvrier algérien.
Prolétariat et système colonial,” Sociologie du travail 1 (December 1962): 313–31.
10. See Travail et travailleurs en Algérie, with A. Darbel, J.-P. Rivet, and C. Seibel (Paris-La
Haye: Mouton, 1963) and Le Déracinement, with A. Sayad (Paris: Minuit, 1964).
11. Bourdieu, Photography. A Middle-Brow Art, with Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, and Jean-
Claude Chamboredon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990 [1965]); The Love of Art. European
Art Museums and their Public, with A. Darbel and Dominique Schnapper (Stanford: Stanford University
Press/Polity, 1990 [1966]); Le Partage des bénéfices, in collaboration statisticians and economists
from the INSEE (Paris: Minuit, 1966); and The Craft of Sociology: Epistemological Preliminaries, with
Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Jean-Claude Passeron (New York & Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991 [1968]).
12. Collective, “Manifeste pour des états généraux du mouvement social européen,” Le
Monde, 1 May 2000.
13. See Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture
(London: Sage, 1977 [1970]).
14. See Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988 [1984]).
15. Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passeron, Monique de Saint Martin, et al., Academic Discourse:
Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professional Power (Cambridge: Polity, 1992 [1965]).
16. Bourdieu, The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, Preface by L. Wacquant
(Cambridge: Polity, 1996 [1989]).
17. Bourdieu, “Public Opinion Does Not Exist,” Questions of Sociology (Middletown, CN:
Wesleyan University Press, 1980 [1973]).

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94 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004
18. These critiques are taken up from various angles in Distinction. A Social Critique of the
Judgment of Taste, tr. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984 [1979]) and
Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1991 [expanded French edition 2001]).
19. See Bourdieu, “L’opinion publique,” with Patrick Champagne, in 50 idées qui ébranlèrent
le monde, ed. Youri Afanassiev and Marc Ferro (Paris: Payot/Progress, 1989), 204–6; interview
with Pierre Viansson-Ponté, “Le droit à la parole” and “La culture pour qui et pourquoi?”
Le Monde, 11–12 October 1977.
20. On these debates, see Alain Lancelot, Opinion publique (Paris: Sofres, 1982); Bourdieu,
“Opinion polls: A ‘science’ without a scientist,” In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Socio-
logy (Cambridge: Polity, 1990 [1987]), 168–74; Bourdieu, Science de la science et réflexivité
(Paris: Raisons d’agir, 2001); also see Johan Heilbron, “Pionnier par défaut?” and Loïc Blondiaux,
“Comment rompre avec Durkheim,” Revue française de sociologie XXXII, no. 3 (1991): 365–80
and 411–42.
21. Bourdieu, “Formes d’action politique et mode d’existence des groupes” (1973), Propos sur
le champ politique.
22. Bourdieu, “Les doxosophes,” Minuit 1 (1972): 26–45.
23. Bourdieu, “Les intellectuels dans le champ de la lutte des classes,” La Nouvelle Critique 87
(1975): 20–26.
24. Bourdieu, “Les doxosophes.”
25. See Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski, “La production de l’idéologie dominante,” Actes de la recher-
che en sciences sociales 2/3 (1976). Other articles were devoted to this transformation, esp. those of
Michael Pollak, “La planification des sciences sociales,” ibid., 105–21.
26. “Déclaration d’intention,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 1 (January 1975).
27. Bourdieu, “Méthode scientifique et hiérarchie sociale des objets,” Actes de la recherche en
sciences sociales 1 (1975): 4.
28. Bourdieu, “Political Representation. Elements for a Theory of the Political Field,” Language
and Symbolic Power [1981].
29. See Bourdieu, “Retrouver la tradition libertaire de la gauche,” Libération, 23 December
1981, 8–9; “Les intellectuals et les pouvoirs. Retour sur notre soutien à Solidarnosc,” Michel
Foucault, une histoire de la vérité (Paris: Syros, 1985), 93–94.
30. Bourdieu, “Université: les rois sont nus,” Le Nouvel Observateur, 2–8 November 1984,
86–90.
31. “Le rapport du Collège de France. Pierre Bourdieu s’explique,” La Quinzaine littéraire 445
(August 1985): 8–10.
32. Since the 1970s, Rocard incarnated a “moderate,” “realist” socialism inspired by Pierre
Mendès-France, but soon enough became the fount for the neoliberal current at the heart of the
French left. Twice prevented from running as a candidate for the Presidency by Mitterrand in 1981
and 1987, Rocard finally used his political weight to be nominated prime minister in the Socialists’
second seven-year presidential term.
33. Bourdieu, “À quand un lycée Bernard Tapie?” Libération, 4 December 1986.
34. Bourdieu, The State Nobility, 389.
35. Pierre Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society
(Cambridge: Polity, 1999 [1993]), a collective work by Alain Accardo, Gabrielle Balazs, Stéphane
Beaud, François Bonvin, Emmanuel Bourdieu, Philippe Bourgois, Sylvain Broccolichi, Patrick
Champagne, Rosine Christin, Jean-Pierre Faguer, Sandrine Garcia, Remi Lenoir, Frédérique
Matonti, Francine Muel-Dreyfus, Michel Pialoux, Louis Pinto, Denis Podalydès, Abdelmayek
Sayad, Charles Soulié, Bernard Urlacher, Loïc Wacquant, and Anne-Marie Waser.
36. Bourdieu, “A Paradoxical Foundation of Ethics,” in Practical Reason: On the Theory of
Action (Cambridge: Polity, 1998 [1994]).
37. Ibid., 144 [tr. mod.].
38. Ibid., 145 [tr. mod.].
39. Bourdieu, “Notre État de misère,” L’Express, 18 March 1993, 112–15.
40. Liber 1 (October 1989): 2.

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 Scholarship with Commitment: Franck Poupeau and Thierry Discepolo 95
41. “Liber continue,” Liber 7 (September 1991): 1.
42. “Une union sans valeurs,” interview with Jürgen Habermas, Liber 10 (June 1992): 16–17.
43. Bourdieu, “L’intellectuel dans la cité,” interview with Florence Dutheil, Le Monde, 5
November 1993.
44. ARESER, Quelques diagnostics et remèdes urgents pour une université en péril (Paris:
Raisons d’agir, 1997). See also Interventions, 296 and 301.
45. Bourdieu and Jean Leca, “Avec les intellectuels algériens,” Le Monde, 7 October 1994.
46. CISIA Charter, Paris, 1 July 1993.
47. “Non-assistance à personne en danger,” with Jacques Derrida and Sami Naïr, Le Monde,
29 December 1994; “M. Pasqua, son conseiller & les étrangers,” with Jacques Derrida, Le Monde,
10 June 1995, 20; “Non à la ghettoïsation de l’Algérie,” with Jean Leca, Le Monde, 25 March 1995.
48. See René Mouriaux and Sophie Béroud, eds., Le Souffle de décembre (Paris: Syllepse,
1997).
49. The Fondation Saint-Simon was launched in December 1982 at the initiative of François
Furet, Pierre Rosanvallon, Emmanuel Le Roy-Ladurie, Simon and Pierre Nora, Alain Minc, and
Roger Fauroux. Bringing together academe, the business world, and the top-level civil service, it
“accomplished the ideological work necessary to conceal political work, [in order to] build the ‘nar-
row way’ followed by political leaders [toward] market democracy as ‘the end of history’ and social
liberalism as the unsurpassable horizon of our societies.” See Vincent Laurent, “Enquête sur la
fondation Saint-Simon. Les architectes du social-libéralisme,” Le Monde diplomatique, September
1998; Serge Halimi, “Les boîtes à idées de la droite américaine,” Le Monde diplomatique, May 1995.
50. See Julien Duval, Christophe Gaudert, Frédéric Lebaron, Dominique Marchetti, and
Fabienne Pavis, Le Décembre des intellectuels français (Paris: Raisons d’agir, 1998).
51. Intervention published as “Against the Destruction of a Civilization,” Acts of Resistance:
Against the Tyranny of the Market (New York: New Press, 2000), 25.
52. Le Journal du dimanche, 10 December 1995, for Ricoeur’s position, and Thomas Gay,
“Alain Touraine, un intellectuel ‘médiatique’ en décembre 1995,” mouvements (September 1997):
29–31.
53. See “Some questions about the gay and lesbian movement,” in Masculine Domination
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
54. Bourdieu, “The Protest Movement of the Unemployed, a Social Miracle,” Acts of Resist-
ance, 88–90.
55. Bourdieu, “Job Insecurity is Everywhere Now,” ibid., 81–87; see also the two issues of
Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales devoted to “New Forms of Labor Domination,” 114 and
115, September and December 1996.
56. “Libé 20 ans après,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 101/102 (March 1994).
57. On Television brought together two courses at the Collège de France filmed in March
1996 for the cable channel Paris Première and one article, “L’emprise du journalisme,” which first
appeared in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 101/102 (March 1994), in an issue devoted
to the theme of “The Stranglehold of Journalism.”
58. ACRIMED, “Manifeste pour la défense de France Culture,” L’Humanité, 5 November
1999. A group of reflection, ACRIMED was launched by sociologist Patrick Champagne and
lawyer Henri Maler; see www.samizdat.net/acrimed.
59. Bourdieu, interview with Lino Polegato (14 December 2001), Flux News (Liège, Belgium)
27 (December 2001–January 2002): 7.
60. Bourdieu, “Address to the True Masters of the World,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 46
(2002 [1998/99]): 170–76.
61. Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy (Cambridge: Polity, 2003 [2000]).
62. Bourdieu, “Making the Economic Habitus: Algerian Workers Revisited,” Ethnography 1,
no. 1 (July r2000 [1962]): 17–41.
63. Interview in Flux News, 24.
64. Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” Theory, Culture and
Society 16, no. 1 (1999 [1998]): 41ff, and idem., “Neoliberal Newspeak,” Radical Philosophy 105
(January 2001): 2–5.

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96 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004
65. Bourdieu, “Pour un mouvement social européen,” Le Monde diplomatique, June 1999
(reprinted in Contre-feux 2, 14).
66. See Bourdieu, “Against the Policy of Depoliticization,” Studies in Political Economy 69
(Autumn 2002 [2001]): 31–41 (available, with many other occasional texts from this period,
at www.samizdat.net).
67. This call was notably launched in 1998 by SUD unionists and the activists of the associ-
ations that had organized European marches against unemployment and insecurity; many of its
initiators are also among the first signatories of the Estates General of the European Social Move-
ment. See esp. Bertrand Schmitt and Patrice Spadoni, Les Sentiers de la colère, 15472 kilomètres à
pieds contre le chômage (Paris: L’Esprit frappeur, 2000). Preface by Bourdieu, “Misère du monde
et mouvements sociaux,” 15–21.
68. On the accepted depoliticized vision of academic reading, one can refer to the example
of Marcel Mauss as analyzed by François Athané, “Marcel Mauss, le don & la révolution,” Agone
26–27 (2002): 183–199.

© 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.