MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

Bourdieu and Marx

Practices of Critique

Edited by
Gabriella Paolucci
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Series Editors
Marcello Musto
York University
Toronto, ON, Canada

Terrell Carver
University of Bristol
Bristol, UK
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 Gabriella Paolucci
Editor

Bourdieu and Marx

Practices of Critique
Editor
Gabriella Paolucci
Department of Political and Social Sciences
University of Florence
Firenze, Italy

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Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
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 To Arianna, Filippo and any other grandchildren, as yet unborn,
with the hope that you will always be able to practice the critique of «the present
state of things».
 Foreword

The chapters in this book explore the intellectual encounter between

Pierre Bourdieu and Karl Marx, which has taken on a new urgency in the
structural global crises of the early twenty-first century. Taken together,
the essays here provide wonderful philosophical and theoretical elabora-
tions of Bourdieu’s engagement with Marx, and more particularly the
subtle ways in which Bourdieu keeps his distance from Marx whilst also
invoking his critical purpose. Contributors differ in their assessments of
how successful Bourdieu is in settling his accounts with Marx, which offers
readers the opportunity to come to their own considered evaluations. In
short, this book is a hugely welcome contribution to the expansive litera-
ture which testify to the ongoing relevance of Bourdieu’s thinking not
only in its own terms, but also in its potential to cross-fertilise with other
currents of work.
I can attest from my own experience that Marxists can doubt the value
of Bourdieusian-inflected approaches to class, which they see as drawing
attention away from the fundamental divide between capital and labour.1
However, it is pleasing to see all the contributors to this book, even those
who ultimately doubt that Bourdieu adds intellectual and political benefit
to Marxism, take a deeply respectful approach to Bourdieu’s writing.

1
 The debate on the Great British Class Survey (Savage et al. 2013, 2015), which used a
Bourdieusian capital-based approach to diagnose the dynamics of twenty-first-century class
relations, illustrates this well. See, for instance, the critiques by Toscano and Woodcock
(2014) or Skeggs (2014). It is striking how little engagement there still is with Bourdieu’s
thinking from within political economy.

vii
viii  FOREWORD

Indeed, specifically on the issue of class analysis, Bidet’s chapter offers an

excellently balanced discussion of their respective views. In fact all the
chapters in this collection are testimony to the value of open scholarly
discussion.
This book strikes a very strong chord to me as someone who has sought
to synthesise aspects of Marx’s and Bourdieu’s thinking in my own studies
of inequality: indeed, my own The Return of Inequality: Social Change and
the Weight of the Past (2021) addresses this debate head on. Since I see
Bourdieu as working within the spirit, if not always the letter, of a Marxist
perspective on inequality and social change, I am therefore delighted to
welcome this collection. As a sociologist with strong historical leanings, I
lack the philosophical and/or legal expertise that many contributors bring
to their chapters, and I have therefore learnt much from reflecting on their
careful textual exegeses and reflections on these two thinkers. In this pref-
ace I do not seek to match this erudition and only seek to offer a few
provocations and reflections of my own.
My preface begins by firstly sketching out why, historically, the debate
between Bourdieu and Marx has become so important, before in the sec-
ond section introducing my own thoughts about the importance of
Bourdieu’s rapier-like use of concepts. Finally, in reflecting on my own
argument in The Return of Inequality, I return to the enduring affiliation
between Marx and Bourdieu which is associated with the overarching con-
cern with time and history in their thinking.

Why Does Bourdieu’s Relation to Marx

Matter Today?
Why do we need to better understand the relationship between Bourdieu’s
thinking and that of Marx, given their very different lineages and affilia-
tions? To be sure, there are the usual scholarly games to be had in compar-
ing the work of different influential theorists, in exposing weaknesses and
absences, and in ultimately coming to some kind of balanced evaluation.
But this kind of academic point scoring is inconsistent with both Marx and
Bourdieu’s deeper intellectual and political aims, as Gabriella Paolucci
brings out in her reflections on the commitment of both of them to the
“practice of critique”.
It is important to ponder why Bourdieu’s work still resonates so
strongly, even twenty years after he died. His undoubtedly influential diag-
noses of cultural capital and distinction (most famously, Bourdieu 1984)
  FOREWORD  ix

are easy to criticise for their Eurocentrism and for their dependency on a
1960s’ French-oriented vision of culture, economy and society. His evoca-
tion of the Kantian aesthetic as the template of cultural capital might
appear to hark back to a world of highbrow intellectuals which were disap-
pearing even at the time he wrote and has now been largely supplanted.
He has little to say explicitly about the significance of gender, ethnicity,
race and age divisions which were profound at the time that he wrote, and
which have only become more evident as the twenty-first century has pro-
gressed. On the face of it therefore, his writing might not seem a promis-
ing stepping-off point to reflect on the corporate, digitally mediated,
globalised and hybridised arenas of culture and consumption which
abound today.2
And yet, we don’t have to search very far to understand exactly why this
exchange matters, since as economists Thomas Piketty and Gabriel
Zucman pithily state, in the twenty-first century, ‘capital is back.’ In this
spirit, it is not incidental that many contributors to this volume make the
discussion of the concept of capital central to their reflections.
The economic aspects of the ‘return of capital’ are now descriptively
well known. Economists, drawing on granular taxation data as well as sur-
vey evidence from across the globe, have shown that not only has there
been a striking rise in top earnings across many nations, but there has also
been a remarkable accumulation of private capital—in the form of trade-
able assets—which has entailed the astonishingly rapid and dramatic build-
­up of wealth. This phenomenon began on a significant scale in the 1980s
as part of the neo-liberal shift towards market provision which reversed the
mid-twentieth-century pattern in which high taxation and interventionist
states brought about the striking decline of private wealth (Piketty 2014,
2020). It has continued, with variations across the globe, ever since. We
should not be distracted by Piketty’s dry and empiricist tones from failing
to register the astonishing trends that he unravels. ‘The market value of
private property (real estate, professional and financial assets, net of debt)
was close to six to eight years of national income in Western Europe from

2
 I do not have the scope here to explicate the vast sociological literature on the ongoing
relevance of Bourdieu’s diagnoses of cultural capital. I refer interested readers to Bennett
et al. (2009), the most rigorous attempt to replicate Bourdieu’s Distinction studies in the
UK; to Savage et al. (2013, 2015), which attempts to reflect on how Bourdieu’s thinking can
inform our analyses of social class divisions; and Savage (2021), which attempts to sociologi-
cally draw out how Bourdieu’s thinking can best inform our analyses of ‘the return of
inequality’. I draw on elements from each of these works, especially the last, in this preface.
x  FOREWORD

1870 to 1914, before collapsing in the period 1914–1950, and stabilizing

at two to three years of national income 1950–1970, then rising again to
five to six years in 2000–2010’ (Piketty 2020, Fig. 10.8, p 430).
The motif of the ‘return of capital’ makes us aware that contemporary
social change involves the build-up of historical privilege as wealth accu-
mulates. When recognising the astonishing expansion of private capital
stocks we therefore need to question the widespread refrain that we live in
a turbo-charged, information-revolution dynamic capitalism, as trum-
peted by entrepreneurs across the globe. Rather, our world has returned
to that familiar to Karl Marx, as he sat in the British Museum reading
rooms reflecting on the dramatic rise to prominence of private capital dur-
ing the nineteenth century. Just like Marx, we are now surrounded by
hugely wealthy people, proclaiming themselves to be the bearers of prog-
ress and enlightenment, whilst living standards for the majority of the
world’s population, including in the richer part of the world, are marked
by insecurity and precarity, even where a degree of economic security may
have been achieved.
And yet, in another sense, we are also in a very different world to that
of Marx, and in understanding this, Bourdieu’s thinking becomes inescap-
able. One of the problems of Piketty’s unravelling of inequality trends is
his invocation that if we can only summon up the political will, we can
reassert the power of a ‘participatory socialism’ which proved so powerful
during the early decades of the twentieth century and—whether in their
communist revolutionary modalities, or in the social democratic reformist
tradition—did indeed lead to a sustained reduction of inequality across
many richer nations. Because Piketty renders social change largely in terms
of shifting relativities of income and wealth, he does not register how
qualitative social changes which have taken place over the past hundred
years means that even if we now are back to nineteenth-century economic
distributions, culturally we live in a profoundly different world (see Savage
2014; Savage and Waitkus 2021). It is precisely for these reasons that the
concept of cultural capital becomes so important, as it permits a debate
with the Marxist tradition whilst also insisting on the fundamentally differ-
ent ways that cultural capital operates compared to the forces of economic
capital that Marx himself highlighted.
Bourdieu’s diagnoses of cultural capital are premised on his awareness
that during the twentieth century, the hold of cultural capital has become
completely inescapable, and this now sets us apart from the capitalist world
that Marx critiqued during the nineteenth century. Educational provision
  FOREWORD  xi

has expanded dramatically, and as economic prosperity has risen, not only
in the global north but also unevenly across the global south, so the expan-
sion of opportunities for commodified consumption has come to the fore.
The fact that—just before the COVID pandemic—for the first time in
world history, half of the world’s population could experience holidays
away from home is a remarkable statistic to ponder.
Let us be clear about the significance of Bourdieu’s thinking here. As
archaeologists, anthropologists and historians have emphasised, social life
is always culturally mediated—this is not a new phenomenon of the later
twentieth century. What Bourdieu brought out was the increasing promi-
nence of routes to inheritance and the accumulation of privilege through
the command and mastery of cultural institutions, codes and capacities—
especially those associated with educational attainment. In Marx’s day,
routes to upward social mobility through educational attainment hardly
existed in any form.3 In Bourdieu’s day, and even more so since he and
Passeron first coined the concept of cultural capital in the 1960s, the hold
of advanced formal education as a lever for social mobility has become
hegemonic across the world.4 We cannot view contemporary capitalism as
if it is analogous to the version that Marx diagnosed in the nineteenth
century, even though its economic drivers remain fully capitalist.
These vignettes reveal all too clearly why the thinking of both Marx and
Bourdieu is needed to grasp the challenges of contemporary inequality.
And yet, as numerous contributors show, the style of thinking deployed by
these two writers is different, and even though some concepts—notably
that of ‘capital’—are central to both writers, it can be hard to square them
up together. Furthermore, Bourdieu insists that his work is not Marxist in
any direct way. Thus as Swartz in his chapter points out (and as other con-
tributors also echo) Bourdieu insists that his writing is formed as part of a

3
 See Andrew Miles (1993), who demonstrates that it was nearly impossible for the chil-
dren of manual workers to move into business, professional or managerial ranks during the
nineteenth century.
4
 Such is the irritating hold of glib liberal discourses of the rise of meritocracy that it is pos-
sible to overlook the astonishing and dramatic rise of formal education in the past century.
‘Our World in Data’ draws on comparative data from the International Institute of Applied
System Analysis, which is widely used by the United Nations. In 1970 only 19% of the
world’s population had experienced secondary or post-secondary education, and by 2020
this had risen to 49%. If those under 15 (who will thereby not have had the opportunity to
have finished their education) are excluded from the population figures, the shift is even
more striking, from 31% to 65%. See Projections of Future Education—Our World in Data.
xii  FOREWORD

scholarly dialogue with numerous academic forbears, including Durkheim

and Weber, and he refuses any direct Marxist lineage. Indeed, as Burawoy
and Paolucci point out (in somewhat different terms), Bourdieu’s wari-
ness towards the ‘theory effect’, in which bodies of scholarly thinking
themselves shape social change in a way that has only become more mani-
fest after Marx’s death, is bound to distance him from the way that the
Marxist tradition became instantiated in totalitarian regimes during the
twentieth century. As Brindisi and Raimondi reflect, we need to place
Bourdieu’s relationship to Marx also in the context of his objections to the
‘actually existing Marxism’ of Althusser, which was of more immediate
concern in the period and place where he was writing. The implication, as
Alciati brings out, is that once we look at Bourdieu’s wider resonances
with Marx, such as in Marx’s critique of religion, it is easier to find
affinities.
Even where Bourdieu appears to genuflect to the same concepts as
Marx, Bourdieu always treats them with suspicion, mindful of how Marx’s
own concepts, precisely because of the historical force they came to play
during the twentieth century, can perform their own ‘symbolic violence’.
This comes out very clearly in the differing relationship that Marx and
Bourdieu had to the concept of class. Neither writer spoke extensively
about class as such, yet class was central to Marx’s account of historical
change, and as Lebaron and Corcuff, and Bidet, show, an awareness of
class is embedded in Bourdieu’s writing. As Burawoy brings out, because
Bourdieu was mindful of the way that the mobilisation of ‘actual’ classes
had itself demonstrated the problematic ‘theory effect’, he wanted to offer
alternative modalities for championing progressive politics, and hence was
highly suspicious of the vocabulary of class, even though many of his fol-
lowers have been keener to elaborate a Bourdieusian class analysis.5
The difficulties of the concept of class are symptomatic of a wider issue:
it has proven largely intractable to find conceptual tools to inter-relate
‘culture’ to ‘economy’. There continues to be an endemic tendency in
contemporary social science to generate silos which handle these sepa-
rately—often using different methods (quantitative vs qualitative); housed
in different disciplines (economics, international relations and politics vs
anthropology and sociology); and using conceptual vocabularies which

5
 It is somewhat ironic that, especially in European sociology, Bourdieu is sometimes seen
to be something of a class determinist even though he made very little use of the concept in
his work, and he largely sought to find other frameworks to analyse inequality and division.
  FOREWORD  xiii

demarcate rather than inter-relate (consider the appeal of Fraser’s (1995)

distinction between the politics of redistribution vs that of recognition).
Piketty’s (2020) critique of ‘identitarian politics’ as somehow distracting
socialists from economic redistribution is a recent example of how this
tension can continue to generate schism rather than alliance. But this silo-
ing is ultimately deeply limiting, and here Bourdieu continues to offer an
inspiring insistence that we always need to put concepts into tension with
others, not treat them as standalone systems. This is why Bourdieu offers
the best, even if contentious, platform to conceptually reflect on how the
cultural and economic can be inter-related, and how a multidimensional
concept of capital is preferable to a purely economistic one.

Concepts as Historical Rapiers

Many chapters here reflect on the different status of concepts in Bourdieu
compared to Marx, and in particular the provisional and ambivalent way
that Bourdieu proffers his concepts, which often seem to lack the clarity
that Marx offers, and rather seem to operate as sleights of hand. Thus,
Aiello relates how none of his main concepts of capital, habitus and field
are original, and represent borrowings from separate and by no means
compatible traditions. Desan notes that Bourdieu’s concepts are not
rooted in a labour theory of value and have no theory of capitalism.
Numerous chapters reflect on the oddity that although Bourdieu draws on
the concept of capital from Marx, he nowhere elaborates a satisfactory
concept of the economic itself, leaving this as some kind of shadowy realm.
On the face of it, any attempt to disinter the respective analytical perti-
nence of Marx and Bourdieu may lead one to favour the former, given
Marx’s concern to establish the conceptual coherence of his analysis of
capitalism as an overarching mode of production, especially in his mature
years as he wrote Capital in contrast to Bourdieu’s different style of analy-
sis, where he routinely sets up tensions and dissonances between concepts.
We therefore need to bring out why Bourdieu refused to use concepts
in the confident and assured style of Marx. As Gutierrez, Lebaron and
Streckeisen reflect, for Bourdieu to have attempted a formal definition of
economic capital, or capitalism more generally, would have run the risk of
isolating an autonomous economic realm which his broader conceptual
framework warned against, which is why he hence invokes the looser per-
spective addressing the ‘economy of practices’.
xiv  FOREWORD

Bourdieu refuses to play the game of setting up an overarching concep-

tual system, which would perform its own kind of symbolic violence.
Hence, he prefers to draw out the metaphorical appeal of concepts, leav-
ing them incomplete and understated. Some critics have seen his use of
concepts in which he largely avoids formal definitions, as a sleight of hand,
as a deliberate appeal to obscurantism (Goldthorpe 2007). Actually, I
think there is a deliberately strategic inclination in Bourdieu, aligned to his
rejection of philosophy and his embrace of sociology, in which the practi-
cal deployment of concepts, and not their analytical purity, takes centre
stage. From this perspective, the dominance of capitalist principles, and
their rationalising norms, makes it important not to set up some kind of
competing theoretical system (such as those which came into prominence
with the structuralist Marxism of Althusser and Poulantzas), but to find an
alternative, flexible, line of critique.
From this practical vantage point, as Gutierrez reflects, ‘naming your
enemy’, in the form of an elaborated concept of capitalism or the ‘eco-
nomic’, can be seen as an erroneous route, one which can be complicit
with the elitism of the ‘scholastic point of view’. For this cannot be any-
thing other than reductive as this objectification is bound to essentialise
what is a more fluid and dynamic system. However, this does not mean
that ‘anything goes.’ It is possible to engage in a much more subtle critical
engagement by taking key analytical terms, and reworking them, contest-
ing their power.
It is in these terms that the implications of his discussion of cultural
capital, most famously encapsulated in his ‘Forms of Capital’ essay, need
to be understood. Deliberately eschewing any kind of a formal account of
economic capital, he instead elaborates the thought experiment of think-
ing through how culture—conventionally understood from within the
humanities as explicitly framed against the economic domain—might
nonetheless be regarded as a form of capital. The triptych of terms he uses
to unpack cultural capital—the ‘institutionalised’, ‘embodied’ and ‘objec-
tified’—is deliberately mobilised to distinguish them from the economic,
even whilst apparently deploying an economistic frame of reference. Thus,
it is important that economic capital is not embodied, whereas cultural
capital is. A lottery winner who wins £1 million is able to spend this freely
(and might even be persuaded to use the money as an investment resource
to fully join the capitalists), whereas someone who inherits a Van Gogh
painting but is unable to give an account of why Van Gogh is a canonical
painter because they have not been exposed to the appropriate scholastic
  FOREWORD  xv

education fails to have cultural capital (to be sure, they could sell the
painting and realise the economic capital, but this is precisely Bourdieu’s
point). In this way cultural capital is both more invidious than economic
capital because of its ‘stickiness on the body’, and more slippery, prone to
mis-recognition, and necessarily becomes tied up with contestations over
the nature of ‘objectified’ cultural capital. Thus, whilst several contribu-
tors skilfully bring out how Bourdieu does not have an effective theory of
the economic as such, this can also be seen as Bourdieu’s overarching
contribution. It is also pertinent to ask why Marx does not have a theory
of the cultural, other than through reductive terms such as ‘base and
superstructure’.
We need to understand Bourdieu’s concept of habitus in a similar spirit.
Taken too literally, and too mechanically, it can easily be criticised for
assuming an over-socialised and over-determined conception of human
agency (e.g. Croce 2016; Alexander 1995; Jenkins 1992). However,
Bourdieu did not use the concept in this kind of psychologically mechani-
cal way, as some kind of ‘master explanator’. His main purpose is simply to
assert, against economists and game theorists, that people come to any
kind of social interaction with an inescapable historical baggage which is
bound to affect how they interact, how skilled they are at improvisation,
and thereby how likely they are to come out of the interaction in a stron-
ger position. Any attempt to abstract from this historical baggage, in the
form of developing formal logics of exchange, is bound not only to mis-
construe how interactions necessarily work, but more than this to be a
form of symbolic violence, in which only those with specific competences
are able to master the interaction involved.
In historical terms therefore, Bourdieu exactly works in the spirit of
Marx, seeking to expose the accumulation, inheritance, and pervasiveness
of privilege and power, and the way that by being universalised and natu-
ralised they can be made to appear de-political. In this respect, Bourdieu’s
analysis of cultural capital in Distinction is utterly consistent with Marx’s
rendition of commodity fetishism in Capital. Bourdieu grasped, there-
fore, that the proliferation of cultural capital in contemporary societies
entail the need for a differing kind of critique which avoids proffering an
alternative formal theoretical schema which could actually set up new
modes of symbolic violence in their wake. Scholastic game playing is so
central to the routine organisation of cultural privilege that it behoves
radical scholars not to partake of it, but to find alternative modes of
criticism.
xvi  FOREWORD

We can characterise Bourdieu’s approach as using concepts as rapiers,

lightning fast in exposing deficiencies in the weak spots of dominant para-
digms, and quickly withdrawing to avoid setting up an alternative set of
orthodoxies. And, just as a skilled fencer would not want to objectify their
opponent, reducing them to a fixed set of properties, so the skilled fencer
will wait to expose weak spots as and when they appear, darting here and
there as necessary.
This, I admit, is the ‘best Bourdieu’, which is fully mindful of how aca-
demics need to be cautious about how we go about our businesses in
building up any kind of scholarly apparatus that can itself then come to act
as a form of cultural capital. But clearly there were occasions when
Bourdieu did not abide by his own best practice. Burawoy is entirely right
that later in his career, as he sought to shore up his reputation and stand-
ing, he did adopt a more conventional academic perspective, notably in
laying out abstract principles of field analysis, which he then worked up
into a defence of scientific rationalism (notably in Bourdieu 2004). Perhaps
in the context of neo-liberal incursions on critical academic autonomy dur-
ing the 1980s, Bourdieu’s approach was tactically adept, but nonetheless
Burawoy is surely right to criticise him for ultimately exhibiting the same
scholasticism as he claimed to be pitching against. Even Bourdieu fell into
the same academic game playing traps which he had also critically exposed.
In my view, this aspect of Bourdieu’s thinking was at its most evident when
he was giving his thinking its most ‘spatialising’ form, through his deploy-
ment of the most formal approaches to field analysis. However, although
this spatial emphasis resonates strongly, for instance in recent sociological
attempts to elaborate analyses of ‘social space’ (e.g. Savage and Silva 2013;
Vandebroek 2018), it is vital to place this element of Bourdieu’s thought
in tension with his concerns about time, which ultimately are more pro-
ductive, and also place him in a closer lineage to Marx.

History and Time
If we are to find the most productive way in which Marx and Bourdieu are
in accordance, it is their privileging of history and time over space that
matters. This is a point that Fowler in this volume underscores with her
thoughtful account of Bourdieu’s relationship also to Norbert Elias (and
see also Gorski 2013). Gareth Stedman Jones (2016) has recently reminded
us that Marx was not a modernist who insisted as an axiom that ‘every-
thing that is solid melts into air.’ Rather, he was deeply embedded in a
  FOREWORD  xvii

classical historical scholarship which insisted that politics matters because

of immanence; that we only have one world, in the here and now, which
requires us to act; and that therefore that ‘philosophers have only inter-
preted the world in various ways, the point is to change it’.
Even though Bourdieu’s own concept of field deploys a strongly spa-
tialising frame, it is his ultimate appeal to history which colours his work.
It is not incidental that so many contributors reflect on his definition of
capital as ‘accumulated history’, and although this phrase is imprecise, it
ultimately underscores the importance of his work. It is not incidental that
he came across the concept of cultural capital in reflecting on changing
French inheritance strategies, or that the question of reproduction and
transmission permeates his thinking.
It is this historical sensitivity that also explains his attraction to using
rapier concepts. In his famous essay ‘Science as a vocation’ Max Weber laid
out the tragic dilemma of modern science—that in conforming to the
rationalising scholarship of modernity, scholars are bound to produce
findings which will be superseded and cannot therefore ultimately ground
any account of value or meaning. As a side note here, several interlocutors
in this volume reflect on how Marx and Bourdieu construe value, mainly
to note that Bourdieu has no concept of economic value such as derived
from the labour theory of value and therefore fall short in providing an
adequate grasp of economic circuits. This is true within its own terms
since Bourdieu makes only general allusions to value as being ‘accumu-
lated history’ and broad references to labour rather than any more precise
formulation. However, since as Weber, following Nietzsche, insists, since
conceptions of value ultimately require a grounding in human, historical
purpose which can only be undercut within capitalist modernity, Bourdieu’s
approach in ultimately refusing an economistic logic has its merits.
It is this orientation to time as tragedy, which has its forbears in Marx
and Weber, which underscores much of Bourdieu’s work. As Burawoy
mentions, one of Bourdieu’s neglected masterpieces is ‘The Bachelor’s
Ball’ (Bourdieu 2008), which returns to his home province of Bearn to
explicate the changing milieux of family farming. One of his most evoca-
tive photographs features the elderly bachelors, who as eldest sons had
inherited their farms, but at the very time that rural economies were losing
ground to manufacturing and the service sector based in the cities. Women
now had better prospects than to marry those men still tied to their family
farms, who were left to look sadly in on the dances of those on the cusp of
history.
xviii  FOREWORD

Bourdieu draws out the necessary irony of a fully historical sensibility.

The inheritor bachelors, the beneficiaries of the historical accumulation of
their family farms, who might be thought to be the historical victors com-
pared to their disinherited siblings turn out, in the longer term, to be the
losers, trapped by their inheritance into eking out a way of life which was
losing its provenance. And so it is that the victorious inheritors can yet end
up, ironically, as the losers. This refrain is a fitting contrast to Walter
Benjamin’s question about ‘with whom the adherents of historicism actu-
ally empathise. The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are
the heirs of those who conquered before them.’ But some victors, it tran-
spires in Bourdieu’s ironic vision, end up being defeated by history itself.
This ironic sensibility pervades Bourdieu’s work. The great cultural
masters who proffer works purported to be of universal appeal are actually
playing scholastic games of cultural accumulation. Meritocracy masks the
transmission of privilege even whilst proclaiming that the doors are open
to all. We are all bound up in the Don Quixote effect. The starting point
of Distinction lies in drawing out how all the young French people flock-
ing to higher education, many being the first in their families to attend
universities, and hence proudly thinking of themselves as driving epochal
change in which the corridors of elite consecration are finally opened up,
are actually being duped. The inflation of education credentials is devalu-
ing their significance at the very time that increasing numbers of French
people are gaining access to them.
This ultimate appeal to history is fundamental because it explicates
Bourdieu’s understanding of social change, in which dispossessed and
marginalised elites, and not just the downtrodden proletariat, can be
forces for change. Here it is certainly possible to complain that Bourdieu
abandons the centrality of the class struggle as a motor of history for a
more nuanced perspective alive to intra-elite struggle and the role of con-
testation within the ‘field of power’. However, in reflecting on the for-
tunes of Marxist revolutionary politics during the twentieth century,
Bourdieu’s perspective might offer more succour to progressive politics in
the twenty-first century. For continuing to work within the spirit of Marx
requires us to recognise the power of cultural capital and leads us to refuse
any reductive appeal to the capitalist economy alone as some kind of deus
ex machina of long-term historical change.

Professor of Sociology Mike Savage

London School of Economics
  FOREWORD  xix

References
Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1995. Fin de siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and
the Problem of Reason. London: Verso.
Bennett, Tony. 2009. Culture, Class, Distinction. London: Routledge.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984 [1979]. Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement.
Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, P. 2004 [2001]. Science of Science and Reflexivity. Trans. R.  Nice.
Cambridge: Polity.
Bourdieu, P. 2008 [2002]. The Bachelor’s Ball: The Crisis of Peasant Society in
Béarn. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Polity.
Croce, M. 2015. The Habitus and the Critique of the Present: A Wittgensteinian
Reading of Bourdieu’s Social Theory. Sociological Theory 33 (4): 327–346.
Goldthorpe, John H. 2007. ‘Cultural Capital’: Some Critical Observations.
Sociologica, 1(2).
Gorski, Philip S. 2013. Introduction: Bourdieu as a Theorist of Change. In
Bourdieu and Historical Analysis, ed. Philip S.  Gorski, 1–16. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Jenkins, R. 2014. Pierre Bourdieu. London: Routledge.
Jones, Gareth Stedman. 2016. Karl Marx. Greatness and Illusion. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Miles, Andrew. 1999. Social Mobility in Nineteenth-and Early Twentieth-­Century
England. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty First Century. Trans. A. Goldhammer.
Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Piketty, Thomas. 2020 [2019]. Capital and Ideology. Trans. A.  Goldhammer.
Harvard: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Savage, Mike. 2014. Piketty’s Challenge for Sociology. The British Journal of
Sociology, 65(4): 591–606.
Savage, Mike. 2021. The Return of Inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Savage, Mike et al. 2013. A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s
Great British Class Survey Experiment. Sociology 47 (2):219–250.
Savage, Mike. 2015. Social Class in the 21st Century. London: Penguin.
Savage, Mike, and Elizabeth B. Silva. 2013. Field Analysis in Cultural Sociology.
Cultural Sociology, 7 (2): 111–126.
Savage, Mike, and Nora Waitkus. 2021. Property, Wealth, and Social Change:
Piketty as a Social Science Engineer. The British Journal of Sociology 72(1): 39–51.
Skeggs, Beverley. 2015. Introduction: Stratification or Exploitation, Domination,
Dispossession and Devaluation? The Sociological Review 63(2): 205–222.
xx  Foreword

Toscano, Alberto, and Jamie Woodcock. 2015. Spectres of Marxism: A Comment

on Mike Savage’s Market Model of Class Difference. The Sociological Review
63(2): 512–523.
Vandebroeck, Dieter. 2018. Toward a European Social Topography: The
Contemporary Relevance of Pierre Bourdieu’s Concept of ‘Social Space’.
European Societies 20(3): 359–374.


 Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the kind Bourdieu and Marx schol-

ars internationally who made this book possible by accepting my invitation
to contribute their writings. Amongst them, I would like to thank Bridget
Fowler, not only for our long  and fruitful discussions of the work of
Bourdieu, but also for having generously checked the English of many of
these  chapters. Amongst  those who, over the years, have occupied an
important place in the course of my studies of Marx, I would like to
remember my late partner, Pino Ammendola, with whom I took the first
steps in both reading the work of the Trier philosopher and in “practical-­
critical activity”. Last, I would like to thank Marcello Musto for inviting
me to publish this book in the series which he edits.

xxi
 Contents

1 Introduction.
 Heirs: Bourdieu, Marx and Ourselves  1
Gabriella Paolucci

Part I Domination: Practising Critique  23

2 Bourdieu
 with Marx, from Economy to Ecology 25
Jacques Bidet

3 Violence,
 Symbolic Violence and the Decivilizing
Process: Approaches from Marx, Elias and Bourdieu 43
Bridget Fowler

4 Putting
 Marx in the Dock: Practice of Logic and Logic
of the Practice 71
Gabriella Paolucci

5 The
 Poverty of Philosophy: Marx Meets Bourdieu103
Michael Burawoy

xxiii
xxiv  CONTENTS

6 Marx/Bourdieu:
 Convergences and Tensions, Between
Critical Sociology and Philosophy of Emancipation131
Philippe Corcuff

7 Bourdieu
 on the State: Beyond Marx?153
David L. Swartz

Part II Inheriting Critique of Economic Practices and

Theories 177

8 Practice
 and Form: Economic Critique with Marx
and Bourdieu179
Peter Streckeisen

9 Does
 Bourdieu “Extend” Marx’s Concept of Capital?199
Mathieu Hikaru Desan

10 Reassessing
 Bourdieu’s Use of the Marxian Concept
of Capital217
Miriam Aiello

11 Bourdieu,
 Marx, and the Economy249
Frédéric Lebaron

12 Marx
 and Bourdieu: From the Economy to the
Economies263
Alicia B. Gutiérrez

Part III Intellectual Field: Interpreting Critique

of Ideology 283

13 Bourdieu,
 Marxism and Law: Between Radical
Criticism and Political Responsibility285
Gianvito Brindisi
  CONTENTS  xxv

14 If
 Theodicy is Always Sociodicy: Bourdieu and the
Marxian Critique of Religion313
Roberto Alciati

15 Bourdieu’s
 Lesson: Marx vs. Althusser?327
Fabio Raimondi
 Notes on Contributors

Miriam Aiello  received her PhD in Philosophy at Roma Tre University.

She is a post-doctoral fellow at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici
(Naples) and Teaching Assistant at Roma Tre University. She has
worked extensively on the historical-philosophical and psychological
ground of Pierre Bourdieu’s economy of practice and of his concept
of habitus. She is preparing a book on Bourdieu’s philosophy mind
and theory of action. Her research interests also include reflexivity,
models of the unconscious, personal identity, self-deception and con-
fabulation and the inter-relations between philosophy, social sciences
and psychology. Her latest articles deal with Bourdieu’s account of
the mental and personal identity; the relationship between Leibniz’s
Monadology and the social theory of Tarde, Adorno and Bourdieu; the
phenomenon of confabulation; the mind-body problem; the structures of
temporal experience (Plato and Kant).
Roberto  Alciati  is Assistant Professor of History of Religions at the
University of Florence (Italy). His research focused mainly on the history
of monasticism and asceticism in late antiquity and early Middle Ages.
However, over the years he has developed a growing interest in Pierre
Bourdieu’s thought, which he uses to study the socio-historical
dynamics of the history of religions. His publications include Norm
and Exercise: Christian Asceticism Between Late Antiquity and Early
Middle Ages (Stuttgart 2018) and Monaci d’Occidente, secoli IV–IX
(Rome 2018). He also translated in Italian and commented on

xxvii
xxviii  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Bourdieu’s two essays on the religious field (Pierre Bourdieu, Il campo

religioso. Con due esercizi (eds. R. Alciati and E.R. Urciuoli; Turin 2012).
Jacques Bidet  is a former professor at the University of Paris-Nanterre
and a founder of the journal Actuel Marx. Throughout his researches
since the 1980s, he has been developing a theory of modern society and
history known as a “metastructural theory of modernity,” mainly
inspired by Marx, in the light of both Althusser and Habermas.
Among his books are Exploring Marx’s Capital (2006 [1985]); Critical
Companion of Contemporary Marxism (2007), codirection with Statis
Kouvelakis); Foucault with Marx (2015).
Gianvito  Brindisi is Associate Professor of Legal Philosophy at the
‘Luigi Vanvitelli’ University (Naples, Italy). He is the author of Potere e
giudizio. Giurisdizione e veridizione nella genealogia di Michel Foucault
(2010) and Il potere come problema. Un percorso teorico (2012). He co-­
edited, with Orazio Irrera, the monographic issue of the review ‘Cartografie
Sociali’ Bourdieu/Foucault: un rendez-vous mancato? (2017). He is the
co-editor and translator, with Gabriella Paolucci, of the Italian edi-
tion of Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociologie générale, volume 1. Cours au Collège de
France (1981–1983) (2019).
Michael Burawoy  has studied industrial workplaces in different parts of
the world—Zambia, Chicago, Hungary and Russia—through participant
observation. In his different projects he has tried to cast light—from the
standpoint of the workplace—on the nature of postcolonialism, on
the organization of consent to capitalism, on the peculiar forms of
working-class consciousness and work organization in state social-
ism, and on the dilemmas of transition from socialism to capitalism.
During the 1990s he studied post-Soviet decline as “economic invo-
lution”: how the Russian economy was driven by the expansion of a
range of intermediary organizations operating in the sphere of
exchange (trade, finance, barter, new forms of money), and how the
productive economy recentred on households and especially women.
No longer able to work in factories, most recently he has turned to
the study of his own workplace—the university—to consider the way
sociology itself is produced and then disseminated to diverse publics.
Over the course of his research and teaching, he has developed theo-
retically driven methodologies that allow broad conclusions to be drawn
from ethnographic research and case studies. These ­methodologies are
represented in Global Ethnography, a book co-authored with nine gradu-
   NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS  xxix

ate students, which shows how globalization can be studied ‘from below’
through participation in the lives of those who experience it. Throughout
his sociological career he has engaged with Marxism, seeking to recon-
struct it in the light of his research and more broadly in the light of histori-
cal challenges of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Among
recent publications are “A Tale of Two Marxisms: Remembering Erik
Olin Wright” (2020); “Going Public with Polanyi in the Era of Trump”
(2019); “A New Sociology for Social Justice Movements,” in M. Abraham
(ed.) Sociology and Social Justice (2019).
Philippe  Corcuff  is Reader in Political Science at the Political Studies
Institute of Lyon and member of the CERLIS laboratory (Research
Centre on Social Links, UMR 8070, CNRS/Paris University/Sorbonne
Nouvelle University). He is active in anti-globalization and anarchist
movements. He was a columnist for the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo
(2001–2004). He is the author of, among others, Bourdieu autrement
(Textuel, 2003), Marx XXIe siècle (Textuel, 2012), Où est passée la cri-
tique sociale? (La Découverte, 2012), Enjeux libertaires pour le XXIe siè-
cle par un anarchiste néophyte (Éditions du Monde libertaire, 2015)
and La grande confusion. Comment l’extrême droite gagne la bataille des
idées (Textuel, 2021). He also contributed to Domination and
Emancipation. Remaking Critique, D.  Benson (Ed.), Lanham
(MD) (2021).
Mathieu Hikaru Desan  is a historical sociologist with substantive inter-
ests in social theory, political sociology, cultural sociology, critical sociol-
ogy, Marxism, fascism, and the history of socialist thought. He has
published on these and other topics in Comparative Studies in Society and
History, Sociological Theory, History of the Human Sciences and Thesis
Eleven. He is working on a book manuscript about the practical logic of
political conversion, with a special focus on the case of French “neo-­
socialists” who became ideologically committed Nazi collaborators during
World War II.
Bridget Fowler  was a founding member of the Department of Sociology
in the University of Glasgow, where she is now an honorary staff member
and Emeritus Professor of Sociology. She is interested in social the-
ory, particularly with reference to Marx and Bourdieu, and, more
widely, the sociology of culture, including the obituary. Her most
recent books are Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical
Investigations (ed., 1997); Reading Bourdieu on Society and Culture,
xxx  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Sociological Review Monographs (general introduction by Fowler, as

well as introductions to each section, 2000); The Obituary as Collective
Memory (2007); Stretching the Sociological Imagination: Essays in Honour
of John Eldridge (ed. Bridget Fowler, with Matt Dawson, David Miller and
Andrew Smith (2015); Time, Science and the Critique of Technological
Reason: Essays in Honour of Herminio Martins (ed. Bridget Fowler, with
J.E. Castro and L. Gomes; 2018). She has written numerous articles and
book chapters of which the most cited are Pierre Bourdieu: Unorthodox
Marxist? in ed. S.  Susen and B.S.Turner, The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu
(2011) (translated into Italian pp.  361–390  in ed. Gabriella Paolucci;
Bourdieu e Marx (2018)) (with F. Wilson); “Women Architects and Their
Discontents,” Sociology, 2004, 38 (1): 101–119 (reprinted in Architectural
Theory Review, 2013, 17, 2–3199–215); and “Pierre Bourdieu on Social
Transformation with Particular Reference to Political and Symbolic
Revolutions,” Theory and Society (2020) 49, 439–463.
Alicia B. Gutiérrez  holds a PhD in Sociology from École des Hautes
Études en Sciences Sociales and a PhD from University of Buenos Aires-­
Anthropology Department; is Tenured Professor of the Chair of Sociology
at the School of Philosophy and Humanities of the National University of
Córdoba; is Principal Researcher of the National Council of Scientific and
Technical Research; and is Director of the Institute of Humanities. On
Pierre Bourdieu she has published Pierre Bourdieu. Las prácticas sociales
(Spanish edition; 1994), under the title Las prácticas sociales. Una intro-
ducción a Pierre Bourdieu (2002); Pobre como siempre…Estrategias de
reproducción social en la pobreza (2004); De la grieta a las brechas. Pistas
para estudiar la desigualdad social en nuestras sociedades contemporáneas
(2021). She has translated a large part of Bourdieu’s work into Spanish for
Argentine and Mexican publishers.
Frédéric Lebaron  is Professor of Sociology at the Ecole normale supéri-
eure Paris-Saclay, inside the université Paris-Saclay. He is the director of
the Human and Social Sciences Department of ENS Paris-Saclay. He spe-
cializes in economic sociology, political sociology and sociology of inequal-
ity. He was a close collaborator of Bourdieu between 1996 and 2002 and
president of the French Sociological Association between 2015 and 2017.
His recent work includes studies on the global central bankers, economic
policies in Europe, dynamics of well-being inequalities in Europe. He
recently published Savoir et agir. Chroniques de conjoncture (2007–2020)
at éditions du Croquant.
   NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS  xxxi

Gabriella  Paolucci  has been a fellow at European University Institute

and then Assistant Professor at University of Florence (Italy), where now
she is Associate Professor of Sociology. Her research focused on time uses,
urban spaces, power and security policies, symbolic violence and State
policies, social theories (Marx, Rawls, Sartre, Heller, Foucault, Bourdieu).
Her books include La città, macchina del tempo (Milan, 1998);
Cronofagia. La contrazione del tempo e dello spazio nell’era della globaliz-
zazione (Milan, 2003); Libri di pietra. Città e memorie (Napoli, 2007).
On Pierre Bourdieu: Bourdieu dopo Bourdieu, (ed. Turin, 2009);
Introduzione a Bourdieu (Bari, 2011); Key Concepts and The State and
Economics, in Re-thinking Economics. Exploring the Work of Pierre Bourdieu
(eds. A.  Cristoforou and M Lainé, London, 2015); Bourdieu & Marx.
Pratiche della critica (ed.; Milan, 2018).
Fabio Raimondi  is Senior Lecturer in “History of political thought” and
Adjunct Professor of” “Forms of political and institutional innovation” at
the Department of Law of the Udine University. He is a member of the
Direction board of the journal Storia del pensiero politico (History of
Political Thought)—il Mulino edition, and of the European Hobbes
Society. His main fields of research are the political thought of the
Renaissance, Hobbes, Marx, Engels and Marxism. He is the author
of numerous essays in journals and collective volumes. Among his latest
books are Constituting Freedom. Machiavelli and Florence (2018).
Mike  Savage  is ‘Martin White’ Professor of Sociology at The London
School of Economics and Political Science, since 2012. He was the Head
of the Department of Sociology between 2013 and 2016. Between 2015
and 2020 he was Director of LSE’s International Inequalities
Institute. Between 1993 and 2016 he was on the Editorial Board of
The Sociological Review, where he was editor between 2001 and 2007,
and as Chair of Editorial Board between 2011 and 2016. He has also
been a member of the ‘Sociology Research Evaluation Exercises’.
Among his most recent books are Class Analysis and Social
Transformations (2000), Urban Sociology, Capitalism and Modernity
(2003), Globalisation and Belonging (2005), The Return of Inequality.
Social Change and the Return of the Past (2021).
Peter Streckeisen  is a professor in the Department of Social Work at the
Diversity and Inclusion Institute of Zurich University of Applied Sciences.
He also is Senior Lecturer (Privatdozent) for Sociology at University of
Basel. He completed a BA in Political Science at University of Lausanne
xxxii  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

and an MA in Sociology at University of Zurich. He holds a PhD in habili-

tation thesis at University of Basel. His main research areas are sociological
theory, social policy, sociology of work and community development.
David L. Swartz  Retired from full-time teaching, David L. Swartz is a
visiting researcher in the Department of Sociology and an occasional lec-
turer in the Core Curriculum at Boston University. He is a Senior Editor
and Book Review Editor for Theory and Society. He was among the
founders and previous co-chair of the Political Sociology Standing
Group of the European Consortium for Political Research. He was
also Chair of the History of Sociology Section of the American
Sociological Association. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Boston
University and a licence and maitrise in Sociology from the University
of Paris V-René Descartes and a BA from Goshen College. His most
recent book Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals: The Political
Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (2013) was co-winner of the American
Sociological Association History of Sociology Section Best Book
Award in 2014. Two earlier books on the French sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (1997)
and After Bourdieu: Influence, Critique, Elaboration (co-edited with
Vera L.  Zolberg; 2004), are widely cited in the social sciences. His
general research interests include political sociology, elites and strati-
fication, education, culture, religion, and social theory. He has pub-
lished numerous scholarly papers on these topics. He is researching
divisions in American conservatism with particular focus on the attitudes
of conservative professors towards the Trump presidency.
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction. Heirs: Bourdieu, Marx

and Ourselves

Gabriella Paolucci

When the inheritance has appropriated the heir, as Marx says, the heir
can appropriate the inheritance. And this appropriation of the heir by
the inheritance, of the heir to the inheritance, which is the condition of
the appropriation of the inheritance by the heir (and which is by no
means mechanical nor fatal), is accomplished under the combined
effect of the conditionings inscribed in the condition of heir and the
pedagogical action of the predecessors, the appropriate owners
—P. Bourdieu, Le mort saisit le vif (1980)

Inheriting Debts, Not Capitals

What does the act of inheriting an author’s work look like? What happens
when a text, a scientific project, an intellectual practice, departs for tempo-
rally and spatially distant territories, unknown to those who gave birth to
them, and where they are embraced as a legacy to be inherited? What
results can this operation produce, when it takes place somewhere like the

G. Paolucci (*)
Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Florence, Firenze, Italy
e-mail: gabriella.paolucci@unifi.it

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and
Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_1
2  G. PAOLUCCI

intellectual field? That is, in a field where everything combines to ensure

that the debt contracted towards the “ancestors”—ones chosen precisely
in order to build recognisable and recognised genealogies—becomes the
stakes of struggles to acquire a new symbolic capital? These questions of a
general order concern any practice directed towards taking up one or
another intellectual inheritance. But they are particularly relevant when
the heir and the inherited in question have the standing of a Bourdieu
or a Marx.
This volume gathers together exercises which each revolve around this
array of questions. It questions the modes and outcomes of the strategies
of appropriation that Bourdieu practised with regard to Marx. These are
strategies that also entirely pertain to us and our own present, should we
choose to honour a debt to Marx and Bourdieu and to affirm a responsi-
bility that we wish to take upon our own shoulders. The spirit of both
authors calls for this kind of disposition. Both Marx and Bourdieu con-
stantly invoked the future transformation of their own legacy, accepting in
advance the rupturing and restructuring effects that this might have for
the edifice they constructed. At the same time, they openly conceived their
scientific project as a debt towards those of whom they had chosen to be
the heirs. There is thus a movement from one inheritance to another. As
Derrida suggests, “that we are heirs does not mean that we have or that we
receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day with this or
that, but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether
we like it or know it or not” (2006: 68).
If the question of inheritance is posed, this is because it can only be
conceived as a task to be fulfilled and not as something already given.
Taking up the task of inheritance means practising a labour of conquest
that reconfigures in new terms that which is being inherited. It means tak-
ing charge of a re-appropriation, which becomes such only if it is open to
an analysis that selects and discerns, filters and criticises. In other words,
the inheritance is realised—becomes real—only when there is someone
who appropriates it and, in so doing, establishes practices that, far from
transforming that legacy into a fetish, instead break it down and select
from it, the better to then reconstruct it. This is a practice that postulates
the mode of detachment without which no appropriation can take place.
The detachment allows for the conquest: without detachment there would
be no appropriation. Nor any labour of recognition. And nor, in the last
analysis, any heirs.
 1  INTRODUCTION. HEIRS: BOURDIEU, MARX AND OURSELVES  3

Detachment is the gesture proper to the orphan, who inherits only

once the—material and symbolic—rupture with their progenitors is com-
plete. In outlining the intimate relationship between the figure of the
orphan and that of the heir, we can draw assistance from Émile Benveniste’s
etymological analysis (2016), showing how the root heres underlies the
“strange relationship” between the two notions.1 Bourdieu also refers to
this scenario when, in The Weight of the World, he writes:

This successful inheritance is a murder of the father accomplished at the

father’s injunction, a going beyond the father that will preserve him and
preserve as well his own “project” of going beyond, given that this going
beyond is in the order of things and, as such, in the order of succession. The
son’s identification with the father’s desire as a desire for preservation pro-­
duces an unproblematic inheritor. (Bourdieu et al. 1999: 391)

The practice of inheritance must, therefore, be conceived in terms of

metamorphosis and not solely of conservation, which would not, after all,
give rise to any “history.” Moreover, to operate under the marker of meta-
morphosis also postulates the exercise of a certain responsibility: one is
responsible for one’s “uses” of the debt that one chooses to contract.
What scenario opens up when the practice of inheritance is situated in
the intellectual field? Here we could evoke the pathologies that give rise to
the dynamics of a field in which the attribution of a prestigious inheri-
tance—or even simple self-placement within a genealogy—has the effect
of transforming that debt into a symbolic capital which is spent in strug-
gles within the field.
Bourdieu devoted a considerable part of his research to unveiling the
dynamics of a field in which agents—intellectuals, and especially academ-
ics—are led, mostly unconsciously, by the very logic of their training, to
treat the legacies of the past as capital, as if designed to be exhibited and

1
 Émile Benveniste shows how the root heres establishes an etymological relationship
between the notion of orphan and of inheritance: “How can this etymological relationship
be explained? […] According to Indo-European usage property is directly transmitted to the
descendant, but he is not for this reason alone qualified as an ‘heir’. At that time, no need
was felt for the legal precision which makes us qualify as ‘heir’ the person who enters into
possession of material wealth, whatever his degree of relationship with the deceased. In Indo-
European, the son was not designated the ‘heir.’ Heirs were only those who inherited in the
absence of a son. This is the case with the collaterals, who divided an inheritance where there
was no direct heir. Such is the relationship between the notion of ‘orphan, deprived of a rela-
tive’ (son or father) and that of ‘inheritance’” (Benveniste 2016: 57–58).
4  G. PAOLUCCI

to produce “symbolic dividends.” In other words, to treat them as fetishes.

In the Lectures on General Sociology at the Collège de France, he poses the
question in the following terms:

As a sociologist, I shall adopt a systematically suspicious attitude towards any

philosophical genealogy that a thinker may offer for their own thinking in so
far as the main function of these genealogies is a social one—that is, to con-
stitute a social capital: we fashion our own ancestry. It is no accident that we
speak of the founding fathers of sociology. Choosing the founding fathers or
ancestors from whom we inherit the eponymous names of our tribes—
Marxist, Durkheimian, Weberian, etc.—is a way of affirming our symbolic
capital, of appropriating the capital of all these prestigious ancestors, to
affirm ourselves as their heirs and in so doing to appropriate the heritage. Of
course, those who declare themselves inheritors thus expose themselves to
the attacks of all those who envy them the heritage or wish to destroy it—in
general their relation to the heritage is described in formulae such as
“You are nothing but a Weberian” or “I’m the true Durkheimian”.
(Bourdieu 2020: 6)

The canonising, fetishizing effect produced by the capitalisation of the

work to which one claims to be the heir is antithetical to the results of an
intellectual practice that instead responds to the call of responsibility and
recognises, in this debt, its own mandate. Responsibility and debt are all
the more demanding in cases like our own, when we are dealing with
authors who tasked us with conducting a critical exercise to be carried out
with the same audacity that so deeply imbued their work.

Classifying the Unclassifiability of Debt

What we have said thus far is firstly useful in warding off one of the pos-
sible misunderstandings to which this book could give rise. That is, the
mistaken understanding that one of its aims is to establish whether and
how far Bourdieu was a Marxist.2 As Bourdieu himself stated on more
than one occasion, to ask whether and in what way an author situated
himself within the Marxist field is a scholastic question that does not
2
 There is not a greatly conspicuous literature on the relationship between Bourdieu and
Marx, but it does nevertheless count some significant analyses. See, among others: Brubaker
(1985), Wacquant (1996, 2002), Andreani (1996), Beasley-Murray (2000), Bidet (2008),
Robbins (2006), Santoro (2010), Fowler (2011), Karsenti (2011), Mauger (2012), Granjon
(2016), Koch (2018),
 1  INTRODUCTION. HEIRS: BOURDIEU, MARX AND OURSELVES  5

provide any useful information about his work.3 It is a question that

responds to the logic of a trial, rather than the imperative of interpretive
clarity. With his habitual radicalism, Bourdieu always categorically rejected
any possibility of a classification of this kind:

Those who have identified themselves with Marx (or Weber) cannot take
possession of what appears to them to be its negation without having the
impression of negating themselves, renouncing their identity. It shouldn’t
be forgotten that for many people, to call themselves Marxist is nothing
more than a profession of faith or a totemic emblem. (Bourdieu 1993: 13)

And further: “To be or not to be a Marxist is a religious alternative, and

not at all scientific” (Bourdieu 1990a: 49), implying a “theological or ter-
rorist use of the canonical writings” (Bourdieu 1990b: 179).
We would like to follow on from Bourdieu in his rejection of classifica-
tory labels that establish sacerdotal monopolies, orthodoxies and hetero-
doxies, and which inevitably result in the neutralisation of the unclassifiable
author’s critical power.4 We would like to inherit this distance.
This book does not therefore intend to sanction orthodoxies or ascer-
tain heterodoxies, and nor does it intend to indulge in the vulgate of a
Bourdieu without Marx, against Marx or with Marx. Rather, it devotes its
attention to the unclassifiable in order to better understand it. It moreover
seeks to draw elements enlightening for our research and critical practice,
from that which cannot be classified within the confines of a self-enclosed
system. This is the first reason why it seems appropriate to banish from our
horizon any reasoning that concerns Bourdieu’s “Marxism” or otherwise.
However, another aspect also needs considering, in order to under-
stand properly why we should want to inherit Bourdieu’s rejection of such
a scholastic artifice. This is a general problem which is inevitably faced
whenever one sets out to read an author in light of his relationship with

3
 “The labelling, which is the ‘scholarly’ equivalent of the insult, is also a common strategy,
and all the more powerful the more the label is, both more of a stigma and more imprecise,
thus irrefutable” (Bourdieu 1990a: 142).
4
 “Just as in a tribal society the passing outsider is subjected to questioning until he can be
located in a genealogy, so the intellectuals who strive to prove their personal uniqueness and
irreducibility do not stop until they have eliminated the unclassifiable—even by resorting, if
necessary, to an arbitrary taxonomy. Hence the production of all the ‘isms’ suitable for des-
ignating total options committing a whole philosophy and employed with the intention of
defining both oneself and the others” (Bourdieu and Passeron 1967: 205).
6  G. PAOLUCCI

Marx.5 It is a problem that ends up presenting a cumbersome obstacle

between our gaze and the work in question. By this, we are referring to
the distinction traditionally used in the Marxist field between orthodoxy
and heterodoxy—a distinction that much of the literature on the relation-
ship between the two authors also leans on. Since the sociologist’s debt to
the Trier philosopher does not respond to the letter of Marxist dogma-
tism—it is argued—a classification may be adopted which consigns
Bourdieu’s eccentricity to a wider field with more blurred boundaries than
that of the so-called Marxist orthodoxy. Thus a “heterodox Marxist”
Bourdieu has been constructed. We do not agree with this operation.
There is an ineliminable union between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, as
Bourdieu himself masterfully shows in his essay on the religious field
(Bourdieu 1991). In the moment that a heterodoxy is sanctioned, the
existence of an orthodoxy is assumed, legitimising its validity. Our pro-
found rejection of the idea that in the Marxist field there exists something
like an orthodoxy to be cultivated, defended and transmitted or, on the
other hand, denied, must lead us to clearly reject the operation of a certify-
ing authority. For its first effect would be to legitimise the dogma-­
producing machine that has created a corpus hardened into ideological
dogma, its “orthodoxy” largely constituted—it has often been pointed
out, even recently6—by ignorance of Marx’s thought. The factors that
have determined the alchemy of its planetary legitimisation belong to the
convoluted and dramatic history of the past century—and to adventures
in the field of power.
If, then, there is no orthodoxy by which to sanction a heterodox appre-
hension of Marx’s legacy, the only useful way of accessing the debt that
Bourdieu contracted with this legacy remains the path of textual compari-
son. This remains the case, even if we are of course well-aware that any
reading of texts, by whatever author, is situated in historical time.
One of the most serious problems encountered when comparing intel-
lectual productions belonging to different national fields of knowledge
and eras is effectively summarised by Bourdieu, when he points out that
our societies and their intellectuals are not “contemporaries” even when
they share the same period according to the calendar. This is due in part

5
 For this kind of approach, see also the Bidet’s book on Foucault and Marx, where the
author curries out an investigation free from any scholastic perspective (Bidet 2016).
6
 Among those who have produced evaluations of this tenor in recent years, we can note
Bensaïd (1995), Musto (2011), Tomba (2011), Burgio (2018).
 1  INTRODUCTION. HEIRS: BOURDIEU, MARX AND OURSELVES  7

to the fact that the difference between contexts does not necessarily make
what happens at the same historical moment “contemporary.” But so, too,
to conditions linked to the perception of works and their reception—con-
ditions filtered and moulded by readings and interpretations foreign to the
national field of production. Bourdieu himself points this out:

International exchanges are subject to a certain number of structural factors

which generate misunderstandings. The first factor is that texts circulate
without their context. This is a proposition that Marx noted in passing in
the Communist Manifesto, an unusual place to look for a reception theory.
[…] Marx notes that German thinkers have read French thinkers very badly,
seeing texts that were the result of a particular political juncture as pure
texts, and transforming the political agitators at the heart of such texts into
a sort of transcendental subject. In the same manner, many misunderstand-
ings in international communication are a result of the fact that texts do not
bring their context with them. […] The fact that texts circulate without
their context, that—to use my terms—they don’t bring with them the field
of production of which they are a product, and the fact that the recipients,
who are themselves in a different field of production, re-interpret the texts
in accordance with the structure of the field of reception, are facts that gen-
erate some formidable misunderstandings and that can have good or bad
consequences. […] If, in general, posterity is a better judge, it is doubtless
because contemporaries arc competitors and often have a hidden interest in
not understanding, or even in preventing understanding from taking place
in others. (Bourdieu 1999: 221)

So, if it is already difficult to establish supranational relations between

two “contemporaries” (for instance, Durkheim and Weber, two eminent
figures in European sociology who deliberately ignored one another,
despite being contemporaries), constructing comparisons between authors
who lived in different countries and at different times is a far more prob-
lematic endeavour. We are aware, therefore, that our reading of Bourdieu
and Marx and their relationship—as well as our way of understanding our
debt to them—belongs entirely to our own time and to the cultural and
political climate in which we are immersed.
Our time is marked not only by the considerable development of the
international reception of Bourdieu’s legacy (Sapiro 2020), but also by
the rebirth of Marx studies. Far from depriving us of an indispensable
point of political reference for our praxis and our thought, the collapse of
the socio-­economic formations and States that claimed to be realising
Marx’s project has ultimately left as us orphans, helping to release the
8  G. PAOLUCCI

intellectual and political energies needed to recapture Marx’s inheritance

with the openness and freedom that a revolutionary spirit like his requires.
As has been written, this collapse “is an opportunity to read Marx within
and against a tradition of Marxism. It is […] our good fortune” (Tomba
2007: 7).7 This is coupled with the opportunity to take advantage of a
historically critical edition of Marx’s writings (MEGA 2)8—provided it
does not remain enclosed within the walls of the academy and under the
glass bell of philology. Although the practical—political—critique of con-
temporary capitalism is still struggling to put these developments to good
use, it is our conviction that they are highly significant for again stirring
the energies of a field that has remained sclerotic for decades.

Inheriting a Dichotomous Marx

It is worth asking which Marx Bourdieu intended to inherit, among the
many that contended the post-1945 French arena (Batou and Keucheyan
2014; Bidet  2008).  And with which interpretation of Marxian work
Bourdieu was polemicising, when he  put  the Trier philosopher in the
dock  for his supposed economicism or for the intellectualism that, in
Bourdieu’s opinion, informed some Marxian notions.9
Incursions into some of the configurations of the Marxist field present
in this volume may already offer us sufficient cues to trace out the image
of a Bourdieu who, while acknowledging the inevitable influence that the
obligatory passage through Marxism exerted on him,10 preserved his

7
 On this point see also Marcello Musto, who points out that “despite the announcement,
at the end of the last century, of Marx’s definitive disappearance, he has reappeared on the
stage of history. Freed from the function of instrumentum regni and from the chains of
Marxism-Leninism, his work has been handed over to free thinkers” (2011: 36).
8
 On this point see, among others: Fineschi (2008), Fineschi and Bellofiore (2009), Musto
(2010), Kurz (2018), Cuyvers (2020).
9
 It may be useful, in this regard, to look at Éric Gilles’s survey on the recurrence of refer-
ences to Marx in Bourdieu’s work (Gilles 2014).
10
 In his Collège de France lectures on Classification Struggles, Bourdieu said on this score:
“We might call for a sociological analysis of the part played in the intellectual education of all
intellectuals by the required initiation, however different in depth, commitment, or passion,
into Marxism. In fact, we need a sociology of knowledge to study the impression we may
have in our twenties that we know perfectly well how to think about what there is to know
perfectly well on the subject of social class: this is a collective experience shared by almost
everyone, and is so completely institutionalized that it renders formidably difficult something
that should be routine, that is, to approach the issue of classes in general virtually from
scratch, and reconsider what it means to classify” (Bourdieu 2018: 5).
 1  INTRODUCTION. HEIRS: BOURDIEU, MARX AND OURSELVES  9

distance both from the “dogmatism of a fossilised Marxism” (Bourdieu

and Passeron 1967), and from the neo-Hegelian interpretations that
spread in France after World War II.  In that period, the discussion of
Marx’s youthful writings, and in particular of the Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844 (1975b), took on such importance as to become a
decisive philosophical event. This was noted by a distinguished witness of
the time, Henri Lefebvre (1957), who was moreover responsible for one
of the first translations of this work (Lefebvre and Guterman 1934).
These were the years in which the myth of the “young Marx” was cre-
ated—whether this was a positive or negative myth. This provides an
example of how the institution of an inheritance can be used as symbolic
capital, constituting the stakes of the battles being fought in the intellec-
tual field. These are, however, battles arbitrated, as Bourdieu would say, by
external sanctions, in this case ones coming from the political field. The
emergence, across the whole of Marx’s work, of a problematic very differ-
ent from that of the evolutionary and economistic Marxism of the Second
International and Stalinist mechanicism, in fact transformed these writings
into an eminently political object of contention. The discovery of the
themes of alienation, dialectics and history—made possible by reading the
early writings—provided the cue for an all-encompassing critique of “offi-
cial” Marxism. Thus a new Marx was born11—different and opposed to
the one that France had known up to that point—and imposed itself on
the debate of the time. And new heirs were born, too. Overturning and
thus redeeming the Marxian inheritance, they came forth to characterise
themselves as his inheritors. In the new space of possibilities that thus
emerged, this redeemed inheritance was deployed as a distinctive value,
resulting from the negative relation that inevitably linked their practice to
the other, coexisting inheritance-practices.
For many years the only texts available in French were the Communist
Manifesto and Capital. It was not until the late 1930s that translations of
The Holy Family, The German Ideology and the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy
of Right appeared. And it was only in the 1960s that the full-length
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Grundrisse were
published. The former was published in 1962, while the latter—which
highlighted elements of continuity between the early works and the late

11
 Mutatis mutandis, this is also what is happening in our own time, with the historical-
critical edition of Marx’s writings in the MEGA 2. It provides not only a large amount of
original materials that were until recently inaccessible but also very different renderings of
texts known for decades in versions very distant from the original manuscripts.
10  G. PAOLUCCI

Marx—only came out in 1967, when Althusser, who had not yet read
them, formulated the singular thesis that “we cannot say absolutely that
Marx’s youth is part of Marxism” (Althusser 2005: 82).12
Bourdieu thus began to give shape to his reading of Marx in a climate
imbued with the idea that there were two Marxes: on the one hand, the
mature scientist investigating the immanent laws of capital, and, on the
other, the philosopher of alienation and philosophical praxis. This scene
saw two sectors of the field lined up against each other: those who saw in
the youthful texts the highest expression of Marxian humanism and the
essence of all his critical theory (among others, Mounier, Sartre, Bigo,
Hyppolite and Merleau-Ponty); and those who regarded them only as an
error of youth, later transcended with the elaboration of the critique of
political economy (alongside “Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy” there was
Althusser, who was the most influential figure representing this current).
Whichever side one took in this dispute, Marx’s work came out dichot-
omised—artificially split in two. There were few who tried to maintain a
balanced position between the two interpretations (among them, in part,
Henri Lefebvre). The effervescent debate of those years was followed by
the so-called crisis of Marxism. In France, as elsewhere, this saw the expul-
sion of Marx from the intellectual and political field, except insofar as he
could be tamed.
Bourdieu always portrayed himself as an outsider with respect to this
debate—probably believing that he could exercise an inheritance-practice
that would allow him to lay claim to an autonomous and original reading,
free from the games taking place on the field (Yacine 2003). However, one
can reasonably assume that the ways in which he constructed his own dia-
logue with Marx were inevitably affected by the atmosphere of an intel-
lectual field dominated by the dichotomous reading of Marx’s work and
the stakes that helped determine its contours.

12
 First published in Russian by Ryazanov in 1927, but still in partial form, the Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 were made available in France in the 1930s, but only in
an abridged form, with the translation from the 1934 German edition first by Lefebvre and
Guterman, and subsequently, in 1937, by Jules Molitor. The French edition in fact presents
many omissions (the parts on alienated labour are missing) and errors. For the first complete
edition, French-language readers had to wait for Émile Bottigelli’s translation, published by
Éditions Sociales only in 1962 (Marx 1962). The Grundrisse were published in French only
in 1967 (Marx 1967, 1986). The literature on the reception of the young Marx in the
post-1945 French intellectual field is quite extensive. For a general survey, the reader can
consult, among others: Burkhard (1994), Ferry and Renaut (1990), Musto (2010: 225–272),
Pompeo Faracovi (1972), Poster (1975).
 1  INTRODUCTION. HEIRS: BOURDIEU, MARX AND OURSELVES  11

Inheriting Critical Practice

If we have devoted this volume to the practice of critique that the two
authors fiercely exercised throughout their career, it is because we believe
that this is the terrain on which we can best illuminate the debt that
Bourdieu wished to acknowledge to Marx. This is the same debt that we,
too, would like to be able to honour and respond to with our own scien-
tific and political responsibilities.
Dialogue with the system of Marxian critique is a constant in Bourdieu’s
work. This is most clearly evidenced by the repeated references to the
Trier philosopher that the sociologist scatters throughout his works, and
by the adoption of a critical perspective that denotes a massive Marxian
presence. From the 1950s Bourdieu developed an empirically grounded
theory of the social world and its institutions, the critical impetus of which
derived largely from his experience of the processes of domination in
French-colonised Algeria—in the analysis of which, he extensively
employed Marx’s model and conceptual instrumentation.13 From this,
Bourdieu draws the themes which were to inform a far-reaching project
for the critical analysis of contemporary capitalist society—of “political
practice in the name of science”—and makes significant epistemological
breaks with the traditional way of doing social science. In the concate-
nated set of critiques underpinning the architecture of his work,14 in the
plethora of questions he raises, and in the scientific practice he adopts,
Bourdieu attaches himself to the Marxian system—notwithstanding his
polemical remarks and deviations from this system (we might even say, by
virtue of them). The framework of this system is constituted by a unitary

13
 Among the most significant Algerian texts see: Bourdieu (1962, 1979, 2004, 2012) and
the book edited by Yacine (Bourdieu 2008). On the closeness of Bourdieu’s Algerian studies
to a Marxian paradigm, it is useful to consult some recent texts, including Denunzio (2017)
and Schultheis (2003, 2007). Bourdieu often combined his research work in Algeria with
photographic practice. In this regard, see Bourdieu (2012).
14
 The critical disposition that permeates the Bourdieusian edifice has been little examined
by literature. If it has remained somewhat on the margins of commentaries and glossaries,
this probably also derives from the fact that the systematic critique of the scholastic universe
and of the position from which intellectuals speak—one of the fundamental themes of
Bourdieusian epistemology—can create a certain discomfort in some fields of reception of his
work. Not to mention the fact that a sociologist who claims to want to “contribute to provid-
ing tools for liberation” through his scholarly work may not be a very welcome guest in the
forums of the current academic field.
12  G. PAOLUCCI

set of critiques:15 the critique of religion, philosophy, ideology, politics,

the State, and, finally, political economy, with which Marx opens up an
entirely new epistemic field, subverting the very idea of science—as many
have pointed out, starting with Blanchot.16
This order of considerations can serve as a guide to an investigation
delving into the modalities of the practices adopted by Bourdieu as he
took up the task of inheriting Marx’s legacy. And it may support the
hypothesis—the main theme of this volume—that the exercise of critique,
which both Bourdieu and Marx practised in a radical way, constitutes a
strong connective tissue binding their projects.
This might seem a bold thesis. And yet, if we look at Bourdieu’s deser-
tion of the discipline du couronnement, we can grasp a trait that Bourdieu’s
critical gesture towards philosophy shares with the one Marx matured in
the years when he wrote his Theses on Feuerbach (1976), Introduction to
Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (1975a) and The
German Ideology (Marx and Engels 1976). Moreover, Bourdieu himself
on more than one occasion linked himself to the reasons that had driven
the Marxian break.
Starting from the identity between philosophy and critique, Marx
makes the exit from philosophy a necessary effect of his project:

Criticism is hand-to-hand combat, and in such a fight the point is not whether
the opponent is a noble, equal, interesting opponent, the point is to strike
him. […] The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by
weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory
also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. (Marx
1975a: 178, 182)

15
 The different objects of Marxian critique that succeeded one another and stratified over
time have also responded to and interpenetrated one another, thus going on to constitute a
coherent and unitary theoretical arrangement—a “criticism.” This topic is addressed by a
vast literature and continues to be so today. See, among others, Benhabib (1984), Bensaïd
(1995), Renault (1995), Musto (2011), Celikates (2012), Burgio (2018), Fineschi (2020).
16
 Maurice Blanchot writes: “Capital is an essentially subversive work. It is so less because
it would lead, by ways of scientific objectivity, to the necessary consequence of revolution
than because it includes, without formulating it too much, a mode of theoretical thinking
that overturns the very idea of science. Actually, neither science nor thought emerges from
Marx’s work intact. This must be taken in the stronger sense, insofar as science designates
itself there as a radical transformation of itself, as a theory of a mutation always in play in
practice, just as in this practice the mutation is always theoretical” (Blanchot 1997: 99).
 1  INTRODUCTION. HEIRS: BOURDIEU, MARX AND OURSELVES  13

This formulation of the relationship between theoretical and practical

critique implies an overcoming of the view previously shared with Bauer
(the need to give critique a philosophical form) and especially with
Cieszkowki (philosophy is only realised by giving it a critical form).
Theoretical critique  cannot be seen as the adequate form for political
struggle, since history develops on the level of real struggles, irreducible
to the level of theoretical struggles. Here, we are still in the middle of the
1840s, but this is a definitive acquisition. For the author of the Theses on
Feuerbach, philosophy must transcend itself, transform itself into “practi-
cal critique,” open itself up to history and, in this way, realise itself: it fulfils
itself by transcending itself and abolishes itself by realising itself. The
becoming-philosophy of the world gives way to the becoming-world of
philosophy: revolutionary realisation and the transcendence of philosophy
as such. To transcend means simultaneously both to abolish and to ele-
vate—to bring to a higher level, the level of history.17 And this certainly
does not mean, as he would specify years later in the Afterword to the
second German edition of the Volume I of Capital, “writing receipts
(Comtist?) for the cook-shops of the future” (Marx 1996: 17). The error
that philosophy commits is not to think of its own critical gesture in rela-
tion to the situation that conditions it, leaving it in the dark. The historic-
ity of thought, its historically determinate determination, requires, on the
contrary, that the critique of reality be accompanied by an interrogation of
the historical conditions of its exercise. This shows how closely Marxian
reflection on critique is linked to envisioning the relationship between
thought and history: critique is always a critique of the historical world
and a theory of its contradictions, upon which “practical critique” is called
to act. This is one of the fundamental theses of the Marxian system: the
critique of reality must be accompanied by the questioning of one’s own
historicity.
In his fierce battle against philosophy and “scholastic reason” Bourdieu
links himself to this plexus of Marxian questions. It is a battle that moti-
vates and underpins his abandonment of the philosophical field, from
which he himself has come. What kind of rupture does Bourdieu make
with the field that he has betrayed—the field of which he considers himself
a deserter? In what name does this betrayal take place? And what is its
object? In reality, just as in Marx, Bourdieu conducts a close critique of

17
 Henri Lefebvre devoted enlightening words to this subject in a book that did not receive
the recognition it deserved at the time (Lefebvre 2016).
14  G. PAOLUCCI

philosophy—embarking on his sociological adventure—in the name of an

exquisitely philosophical demand. But it is a demand radically opposed to
the posture put into the field by the scholé—the sphere in which philoso-
phy lives and thrives.
The Bourdieusian abandonment and betrayal translate into a research-­
practice directed towards the social world and a vision of scientific knowl-
edge which, in reality, find the tools for a critique of philosophy within
philosophy itself (Macherey 2014). Among the authors that serve as refer-
ences for this change of perspective we find, along with Bachelard,
Canguilhem, Spinoza and Pascal, also Marx. Bourdieu expresses his debt
towards him through both implicit and explicit references, especially in
the writings in which he begins to systematise his epistemology.
The intention of Bourdieu’s defection is clear. It is to promote a “nega-
tive philosophy”—as the subtitle of Pascalian Meditations (2000) states—
that addresses the ordinary things of life and offers the tools to make
contact with social practices. And to denounce the errors to which the
scholastic illusion leads, as it fosters ignorance both of what happens in the
order of the polis and politics, and of “what it is to exist, quite simply, in
the world. It also and especially implies more or less triumphant ignorance
of that ignorance and of the economic and social conditions that make it
possible” (2000: 15). Here we find a decisive element of consonance
between the Bourdieusian critique of the “philosophical mind” and the
Marxian critique of “critical criticism,” as stated in the subtitle of The Holy
Family (Marx and Engels 1975), to which Bourdieu makes explicit refer-
ence. If for Marx the idealist thinkers’ error is that they do not think about
their own link with German reality and do not place their own critical
activity in relation to the crisis situation that conditions it, for Bourdieu
the fallacy into which philosophers fall consists in failing to grasp the need
for a reflexive return, in failing to assume their own unthought, thus leav-
ing them prey to the amnesia of genesis. For both, the social determina-
tions of thought and practice must be brought to light, in a gesture of
epistemic reflexivity that comes to “objectify the subject of objectifica-
tion,” according to Bourdieu’s well-known adage. It is worth quoting in
full at least one of the many passages in which, with his usual irony, he
clarifies his position:

Only a critique aiming to make explicit the social conditions of possibility of

what is defined, at each moment, as “philosophical” would be able to make
visible the sources of the philosophical effects that are implied in those con-
 1  INTRODUCTION. HEIRS: BOURDIEU, MARX AND OURSELVES  15

ditions. This alone would fulfil the intention of liberating philosophical

thought from presuppositions inscribed in the position and dispositions of
those who are able to indulge in the intellectual activity designated by the
term “philosophy”. For, while it has to be pointed out that the philosopher,
who likes to think of himself as atopos, placeless, unclassifiable, is, like every-
one, comprehended in the space he seeks to comprehend, this is not done
in order to debase him. On the contrary, it is to try to offer him the possibil-
ity of some freedom with respect to the constraints and limitations that are
inscribed in the fact that he is situated, first, in a place in social place and also
in a place in one of its subspaces, the scholastic fields. (Bourdieu 2000: 28–29)

Marx and Bourdieu’s common critical gesture towards philosophy,

however, has divergent outcomes. While for Marx the realisation of phi-
losophy is concretised in “practical criticism”—in the leap that takes praxis
right into the contradictions inherent in the historical process, which the-
ory sees but cannot alter—for Bourdieu critical practice is anchored in the
plane of scientific rationality. It is this plane that he entrusts the unveiling
of the mechanisms of domination, indispensable to their subversion.18
This means “to engage, armed only with the weapons of rational dis-
course, in a struggle that was perhaps lost in advance against enormous
social forces, such as the weight of habits of thought, cognitive interests
and cultural beliefs bequeathed by several centuries of literary, artistic or
philosophical worship” (Bourdieu 2000: 7).
In his appeal to the unveiling function of reason, Bourdieu associates
himself with the radical desire for illumination that the author of Capital
put to work in his own efforts to unmask the essentialism and naturalism
of classical economics. This happens partly through the use of categories
borrowed from the Marxian framework—the notion of fetishism and capi-
tal, and the very definition of his own theory as a “general economy of
practices,” well illustrated by the contributions collected in the second
part of this volume. But so, too, with Bourdieu’s very way of proceeding
in the practice of a social science that sets up an open conflict with the
apparent solidity of the real and with scientific doxa—namely, with those
discursive productions that seem to describe a social order, while in reality
they prescribe it. This is essentially the same conflict that Capital engages
against the dual plane of the economic reality of capitalism and the dis-
courses that legitimise it, through which classical economics naturalises

 On this theme, see also the highly stimulating analysis offered by Bruno Karsenti (2013).
18
16  G. PAOLUCCI

what is produced by history. It is thus a critique of unfounded attempts to

justify capitalism—claims that inform classical economic doctrines and
have a specific political function. In this respect, the Marxian critique of
political economy is the daughter of the critique of political power and its
institutions, first and foremost meaning the State, whose social foundation
lies in the economy, as Marx writes in one of his most important texts on
the critique of ideology, On the Jewish Question (1994).
Bourdieu puts the perspective adopted by Marx to the test in his analy-
sis concerning the figure of the fetish—that is, those “things” that men
believe to possess superhuman powers, such as capital and the commodity.
He does this in his work of unmasking the naturalising effects that act
upon the social world: from the masculine domination (Bourdieu 2001)
to the “spectacle of the universal” that the State seeks to give of itself,
spreading the belief that the State’s view of the social world is an impartial
viewpoint without viewpoints (Bourdieu 2014). These naturalising effects
constitute one of the most powerful dispositifs of scientific discourses that
hypostatize the existing (such as the phenomenological approach, the sci-
entifically erroneous ultra-empiricism complicit in the naturalised order,
or Gary Becker’s Rational Action Theory). On the terrain of this system-
atic work of dismantling the doxa—which, we should remember, is not
only a set of discursive productions but is above all the opaque consistency
of the social world—Bourdieu constructs what he terms a “materialist
theory of the economy of symbolic goods,” founded on the connection
between the material and symbolic, the objective and subjective dimen-
sions. If Marx, with his analysis of commodity fetishism, shows the real
inversion of phenomenal forms—which conceal the essential forms instead
of revealing them, since they are nothing more than appearances—
Bourdieu shows how the dominant economic thought operates a denial of
practices that seem to be situated only on the symbolic level, when in real-
ity they also possess an exquisitely material, economic nature.
Uncovering this connection—and this reversal—is one of the most sig-
nificant moves that Bourdieusian sociology makes (Fowler 2020). It thus
constitutes striking proof of the fallacy of those readings that assert that
the symbolic dimension is Bourdieu’s sole analytical terrain. In reality, he
never ceases to claim, as the objective of the clarification provided by sci-
entific reason, the unveiling of the forms in which the symbolic and the
material, the objective and the subjective, mutually support each other.
Forms that resist those scientific approaches which, believing they
 1  INTRODUCTION. HEIRS: BOURDIEU, MARX AND OURSELVES  17

understand the social world simply by duplicating it, end up legitimising it

as it is. Bourdieu devoted a great deal of attention to this terrain, returning
to it repeatedly: the union between the power of the symbolic and the
power of the material pervades the entire social world, and it is only
through the power of this interweaving that the specific form of violence
that is symbolic violence can be exercised. In order to reveal its hidden
effects—that is, fulfil science’s task—it is necessary to accomplish a work
of double objectification:

The double objectification that science needs to accomplish: the objectifica-

tion of objective structures (those relations that are not reducible to their
manifestations and interactions) and the objectification of incorporated
structures (those mental structures that are produced by the social, and
through which we think the social)”. (Bourdieu 2020: 15)

But this is also the level on which the sociologist engages in one of his
fiercest battles with the author of Capital. He accuses Marx not only of
adopting an intellectualist approach but also of not sufficiently consider-
ing the subjective dimension of social relations, in the last analysis mean-
ing that he has conducted an economistic analysis of capitalism. Yet, a
careful reading of the critique of political economy shows that for Marx
the economic sphere is not only the objective, material one, but also
encompasses symbolic and subjective dimensions that contribute to con-
stituting the real.19 So, we might ask ourselves what drives Bourdieu’s
polemical ardour. We could advance the hypothesis that it stems from a
fundamentally ambivalent disposition towards the Trier philosopher: on
the one hand, the propensity to acknowledge one’s debt to an immanent
science of the contradictions of social reality; on the other, the desire to
push the power of Marx’s critical gesture beyond the limits that this same
gesture could not—or only partially—surpass. Proof of this comes in
Bourdieu’s numerous and heartfelt “appeals” addressed to Marx, in which
the sociologist calls on the author of Capital and the theorist of the

19
 Alberto Burgio invites us to reflect on the fact that even the notion of production,
“against all the economistic interpretations of his thought, contains a great complexity and
critical power, since different dimensions and levels of action converge therein. Production
always embraces […] material and immaterial, objective and subjective, factual and ‘spiritual’
dimensions, in a dynamic only partly inherent to the economic” (Burgio 2018: 161–162;
423–426).
18  G. PAOLUCCI

class struggle to stick more closely to his theoretical and programmatic

premises.20
On the same wavelength is Bourdieu’s invitation, in his inaugural lec-
ture at the Collège de France, addressed towards those who profess faith
in Marxism:

Only a social history of the workers’ movement and its relations with its
theorists both inside and out would enable us to understand why those who
profess to be Marxists have never really submitted Marx’s thought and espe-
cially the social uses made of it to the test of the sociology of knowledge,
which Marx initiated: and yet, without hoping that a historical and socio-
logical critique will ever be able completely to discourage the theological or
terrorist use of the canonical writings, one might at least expect it to deter-
mine the more lucid and resolute to stir themselves out of their dogmatic
slumber and to put into action, in other words, to put to the test, in a scien-
tific practice, theories and concepts which, thanks to the magic of ever-­
renewed exegesis, are assured of the false eternity of the mausoleums.
(Bourdieu 1990b: 179)

This is a testament to how a self-styled heir can take on the onerous task
of inheriting an intellectual legacy, by practising selection and criticism,
without thereby transforming it into a reified “inheritance”—that is, a
symbolic capital to be spent on his own personal prestige.

20
 This passage from the Lectures on Classification Struggles at the Collège de France, in
which Bourdieu “calls on” Marx to show greater coherence in class theory, aptly highlights
the double dimension of the Bourdieusian critique which we mentioned above: “Going
beyond these alternatives [objectivity or subjectivity] would require integrating objective
classification with the conflict over classifications, rather than simply juxtaposing the two. In
the case of social class, we cannot avoid the encounter with Marx, and we cannot help but
think that it was he himself who achieved this fusion, for it was he who gave us both an
objectivist notion of social class and a theory of class struggle. Yet it seems to me that this
integration is superficial, and I fear that the weakness of Marx’s thought lies in the fact that
he did not integrate a scientific theory that aims to describe social classes according to their
objective properties with a theory of the struggle between different class systems that can
transform or modify this objective structure. It seems to me that he failed to achieve this
integration and allowed Marxist theory to oscillate successively or simultaneously between,
on the one hand, a theory of a physicalist, mechanistic, and determinist kind-with, for exam-
ple, the theory of the final catastrophe that was much discussed in the interwar period-and,
on the other hand, a theory of revolution as a kind of engine in which compression leads to
explosion” (Bourdieu 2018: 64–65).
 1  INTRODUCTION. HEIRS: BOURDIEU, MARX AND OURSELVES  19

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 PART I

Domination: Practising Critique

 CHAPTER 2

Bourdieu with Marx, from Economy

to Ecology

Jacques Bidet

This “Bourdieu with Marx” is written in the same spirit as my book

Foucault with Marx (Bidet 2016). While Bourdieu’s work is liable to
feed criticisms of Marxism, it also provides essential elements for its
recasting on a broader basis. I have already tackled this vast subject else-
where (Bidet 2005). Here, I will focus on one central point: class struc-
ture in modern society and, more precisely, the question of the
“bipolarity” of modern class domination. Like Foucault, although in
very different terms, Bourdieu brings out the duality of what Marx des-
ignated as the “dominant class.” The former investigates a “knowledge-
power”—a power of knowledge, distinct from the power of
capital—whereas the latter deals with a cleavage between economic capi-
tal and “cultural capital.” In these terms, the two more or less adequately
evoke concepts necessary for understanding the class structure in mod-
ern society, but which remain in the background of the Marxian schema.
The complex set of questions to be reconsidered here, both in Bourdieu

J. Bidet (*)
University of Paris-Nanterre, Nanterre, France

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 25

Switzerland AG 2022
G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and
Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_2
26  J. BIDET

and in Marx, especially concerns culture, reproduction and social domi-

nation. But what about this duality of domination? And how is this to be
understood in the era of ecological disaster?

Foucault and Bourdieu: A Dominant Class

with Two Poles

With Bourdieu, this bipolarity is given in sociological terms. A concrete

presentation is provided to us in Distinction (Bourdieu 1984: 128–9). We
can take the graph entitled “Space of social positions, Space of lifestyles.”
Vertically, this crosstab presents differences of “volumes” of capital,
according to a hierarchical distribution; and, horizontally, the distribution
between cultural capital and economic capital. In the upper part, there is
a contrast between its left side, which features the academics, rich in cul-
tural capital, and its right side, which brings together the bosses and the
senior executives of industry, endowed with economic capital. Similarly, in
the lower part, where the volumes of capital are lower, the world of
employees, better endowed with culture, is contrasted with that of arti-
sans, better endowed economically. All of this may seem trivial, if we read
it as a table of stratification, of superimposed social layers, each dividing
into one fraction which draws its position from its culture and the other
from its wealth. But, from Bourdieu’s perspective, this is not a descriptive
diagram of the distribution of various social functions, giving rise to com-
plementarity and hierarchy, but rather a general picture of class “domina-
tion” in a modern society. And this centrality of domination opens up a
wider research programme, in affinity with Marx’s.
Foucault proposes a debatable concept of knowledge-power. There is
indeed knowledge in society at large, in all its strata and fractions. There
are knowledges of different content, quality and potentiality: but it is not
this gradation that determines the class divide. Foucault reveals the dis-
tancing mechanisms through which knowledge-power is exercised. He
strongly emphasizes the ability of senior management or the medical pro-
fession to reserve for themselves the information and the knowledge they
possess so as to protect themselves from inquisition and disturbance from
below. Bourdieu is interested not only in the exercise of power but also in
the social process by which it is constituted and reproduced as the privi-
lege of a fraction of the dominant class. He analyses the way in which some
agents happen to be endowed with such a “capital” according to a mecha-
nism which is both that of its production and that of its reproduction
 2  BOURDIEU WITH MARX, FROM ECONOMY TO ECOLOGY  27

because it is a structural mechanism. At the centre of his investigation is

the fact that what is thus produced and reproduced is not knowledge
properly speaking but a cultural-political “competence,” socially instituted
as such in this fraction of the social body that attributes it to itself. Foucault
tackles this knowledge-power as a matter of fact, a social pathology that
must be resisted and pushed back. He shows how this process is self-­
sustaining. Bourdieu takes things quite differently. He speaks not of
“knowledge” but of “competence”: he analyses the structural conditions
in which the power of a “competent authority” occurs through state
processes.
By comparison, the Marxian picture of the so-called capitalist society
appears incomplete, unfinished: unipolar. With Bourdieu, the economi-
cally dominant and the culturally dominant appear as constituting two
“fractions” of the dominant class, of which the first, in his eyes, “domi-
nates” the second. With Marx, and in the tradition which refers to him,
there would be no room for such a bipolarity in the dominant class: the
“culturally dominant” would not appear as such on the screen, and nor
would the agents of “organization.” Certainly, it is assumed that there are
powers other than that of the shareholders. But it is generally located in
the “bureaucracy” of the companies or the state, or in a “technostruc-
ture.” Marx, it is well known, referred to executives as the representatives
of the capitalists, as their “officers,” with their “petty officers,” and to state
representatives as forming the political “staff” of capitalist power—a rash
formula, this, which cannot of course be taken for a concentrate of his
political theory. Marx thus tends to reduce them to their functions in the
“capitalist” class relation. This does not prevent him from working out
sophisticated analyses of the divisions within what he also refers to as
“bourgeois” society, a more all-encompassing term, which evokes the part
played by a cultural social force. But this approach does not yet tell us
anything about the nature of its specific power, nor of its constituent
sources, nor of what constitutes its unity and its identity as an element of
the dominant body. For Marx, therefore, the modern ruling class is that of
capital, which establishes its power in the whole of society through the
functional elements that it presupposes.
What Marx lacks here are the concepts that would allow him to con-
ceive this structural duality of modern domination. From this would fol-
low, among the post-Marx Marxists, the custom of designating modern
societies as “capitalist” societies. This category of “capitalism”—admit-
tedly called for in terms of the primordial role that capital plays in this type
28  J. BIDET

of society, on a national and global scale—in reality constitutes an episte-

mological obstacle, which weighs on both Marxism’s socio-economic
analysis and its political strategy. That is, at least, what I would like to show.

How Bourdieu Builds the Second Pole

In both of these authors, there is, beyond economic antagonism, another
battleground which is ideological-cultural in character. Marx approaches it
in terms of a clash between ideas: “The thoughts of the dominant class are
also, at all times, the dominant thoughts, (…) the ideal expression of the
dominant material relations, (…) the expression of the relations which
make a class the dominant class, (…) the ideas of its domination” (Marx
1998: 67). One could thus speak of “neoliberal ideology” and of a “cri-
tique of ideology.” Bourdieu, for his part, refuses to reduce cultural domi-
nation to its content in terms of ideas. He does not ignore the question of
“ideology.” On the contrary, he is particularly effective in demystifying it:
his analysis of the school system is a remarkable contribution to the cri-
tique of the ideology of “gifts,” “vocations” and so on. But by advancing
the concept of “cultural capital,” he operates an epistemological break,
leading us from a theory of ideology to a theory of culture, which is a cri-
tique of culture. In the communist movement, which has always consid-
ered itself the heir to the Enlightenment, the theme of the alliance between
the proletariat and the “forces of culture” would be a classic question.
Bourdieu, by contrast, situates scholarly culture in the context of “cul-
ture,” taken in the sociological sense, as including all the cultural forms
(language, lifestyles, goods and practices) specific to a given society or to
some of its fractions.
Bourdieu’s approach unfolds along two lines. On the one hand, he
shows that, through family and educational mechanisms, the ruling class
reserves for itself the most complex forms of scholarly, scientific, literary or
artistic culture, supplying its members the “habituses” required for mas-
tering them. On the other hand, he introduces into ideological-cultural
analysis a quite different and more innovative consideration. This early
acquisition of knowledge potential is linked to that of purely distinctive
codes: forms of language, postures, customs. Thus, in the hierarchy of the
educational structure, agents endowed with the habitus required for
higher functions, by virtue of their social origins, are also offered the
acquisition of cultural discriminants. In times past this meant Latin, and
today mathematics, even with regard to jobs for which it hardly seems
 2  BOURDIEU WITH MARX, FROM ECONOMY TO ECOLOGY  29

necessary. In terms of artistic activities, “properly aesthetic delight” is sim-

ilarly associated with “the effect of distinction” (Bourdieu 1991: 34–36).
The selection mechanism of appropriating the “highest” forms of cul-
ture (in scientific, literary, administrative and artistic fields) thus contrib-
utes to the reproduction of a system that articulates a dominant/dominated
relationship. But it is all the more “violent” because it relies on the excel-
lence attributed to the modes of existence, conduct, language, practices,
which are specific to the dominant. Academic excellence, which deter-
mines “competence” as affirmed in the titles which are conferred, is built
on the relationship between these two aspects of “distinction.” A certain
cultural arbitrariness designates in advance the elected, those who can be
credited with superior capacities, because they demonstrate it by their dis-
tinction. There is no calculation in this: the masters themselves share the
same common sense of what is “distinguished.” The question of content,
ideology or knowledge, without losing its sociological significance, is thus
relayed by that of the role of symbolic forms in social relations. This is a
horizon that Marx had not opened up. And it is from here that the differ-
ence between two ways of conceiving the reproduction of domination
would appear.

Structural Reproduction According to Marx

The concept of “mode of production” is to be understood as that of a
coherent and stable socio-economic system, that is to say, one provided
with the conditions for its renewal. Marx starts its construction from its
most elementary formulation under the name of “simple reproduction,”
inherent in the “process of capitalist production” as such. This is the sub-
ject of chapter 23 (Marx 1976: 711–724). The employee transfers the
value of the means of production (input) into a commodity product (out-
put), producing—at the same time as the value of his own wages, ensuring
his own reproduction—a surplus value, which ensures the reproduction of
the capitalist, and, in “extended reproduction,” an additional value, which
allows for investment. In this process, here reduced to its most elementary
figure, consists the stability of the system, as competition entails some
capitalists falling into the condition of an employee and the rise of some
employees to the rank of capitalists. The capitalist production process
sends some upwards and others downwards with a regularity which ensures
the stability of the structure.
30  J. BIDET

This model, which concerns capitalism specifically, fits into the con-
text of historical materialism. Supposedly, such a configuration defines a
determinate stage along the chain of social forms which class societies
successively take. This sequence of transformations, from one to the
other, is intelligible only on condition that they are connected to a
schema that is common to all of them. As we know, Marx defined such a
schema in his short preface to A Critique of Political Economy, constitut-
ing, he writes, his “guiding thread.” The economic “base” of society is
to be understood as the articulation of “productive forces,” that is to say,
of techniques and skills specific to a period, and of “social relations of
production,” that is, division, control and direction of labour, as well as
ownership of the means of production, appropriation and distribution of
the product. The “mode of production” specific to a type of society is
the mode of connection of such an economic “base,” or “infrastruc-
ture,” and a political, economic and legal “superstructure.” It implies
the existence of a form of state endowed with the power necessary for
implementing the juridical provisions involved in these social relations of
production. Such configurations give rise to ideological constructions
which illustrate and legitimize them.
To borrow an expression from Marcel Mauss, this model tends to
define a “total social fact,” un fait social total. More precisely, it means that
one can understand technique only in its connection to social relations,
and economics only in connection to the juridico-political. It constitutes a
functional model, an articulation of technical, social, cultural and political
elements in mutual presupposition. This is no more, one could say, than
the banal idea of a certain correspondence between an economical and a
political order. The peculiarity of Marx’s approach is that he understands
this couple in terms of class, that is, of social “contradictions” between a
ruling class and a dominated class. A mode of production is therefore a
social structure comprising not only the conditions of its reproduction but
also its transformation. It is “developing” as long as the relations of pro-
duction and the productive forces remain in line with one another, stimu-
lating each other. But, at a certain point, the development of the productive
forces happens to upset the relations of production, thus opening onto a
“new era.” This is how, in the penultimate chapter of Capital Volume I,
which in reality represents the final chord of this long symphony, Marx
argues that the development of the large industrial enterprise under the
impetus of technique and science gradually provides employees with an
organizational configuration they eventually prove able to master for
 2  BOURDIEU WITH MARX, FROM ECONOMY TO ECOLOGY  31

themselves, thus paving the way to socialism (Marx 1976: 927–931).

Paradoxically, the relevance of this analysis would find its confirmation
precisely in the error of the diagnosis to which it gave rise. From the 1970s
to 1980s, the rise of digital technology—a revolutionary “productive
force”—would in fact make a contribution in the opposite direction, pro-
viding the capitalist entrepreneur with the means to break this trend, and
thereby also the industrial wage labour system, by introducing market
relations within the large company. But, a priori, there is nothing to say
the wheel could not turn in the opposite direction, since the digital is itself
endowed with an immense organizational capacity. Be that as it may, let us
retain the essential point here: the programme of “historical materialism”
includes not only the question of “social relations” but also that of their
relation to “productive forces.” This materialism is about the structural
trends which generate transformation or mutation. It therefore includes a
theory of history. This is precisely what makes the difference with a socio-
logical programme.

Reproduction According to Bourdieu

When Bourdieu and Passeron published La reproduction in 1970, they
might have seemed to be working on a field opened up by Marx, whose
Capital is a theory of modern social structure and its reproduction
(Bourdieu 1977). They propose to show how the educational institution
“contributes” to such a reproduction. The same goes for Durkheim, who
defines the “social fact” on the basis of a certain “constraint on the indi-
vidual,” a linguistic, legal, religious or moral constraint, by which a coher-
ent social order is reproduced. It is easy to see how they broaden this
perspective. Regarding the relationship with Marx, by contrast, the prob-
lem is that we never arrive at the point where this “contribution” would
actually appear as a contribution, that is to say, would combine conceptually
with the Marxian concept of reproduction. The gap between the two per-
spectives is obscured by the importance of Marxian references in Bourdieu’s
conceptual apparatus, at the centre of which the notion of “reproduction”
is understood as that of class relations and class fractions, class institutions,
the class state, as well as the reproduction and accumulation of “capitals.”
Even if these notions do not have the same contours as in Marxism, they
imply certain essential presuppositions insofar as they both refer to a rela-
tion of class domination. If one wants to explain and appreciate the distor-
tions between the “results” that the two programmes can respectively
32  J. BIDET

claim and, equally, what one can expect from the one and the other, one
needs to discern the difference between their respective programmatic
purposes.
Bourdieu, too, considers the fact of a structure and the problem of its
reproduction. There is, as we have seen, a vertical axis, according to the
volume of capital, and a horizontal axis, according to the nature of this
capital. This is the “class structure” whose “reproduction” Bourdieu deals
with. The social totality, understood as a set of “fields,” analysed as provid-
ing as many “games” that everybody practises according to her/his pre-
dispositions (habituses), that is, her/his place in the class structure. But in
the Weberian sociological tradition, where society is analysed in terms of
different “spheres,” representing different “stakes,” the problematic of
“fields” is not oriented towards the consideration of the system as such, as
relation between its parts, in its functionality, its logic, its contradictions.
Bourdieu deals with the interrelationships between the different “fields,”
rather than with the whole. He stresses, certainly, that the hierarchies
which prevail within the various fields corroborate each other, so that this
scattering in various fields does not eliminate a general cleavage between a
dominant class and a dominated class. Because of this homology between
fields, he can speak of a “class habitus.” However, what draws his attention
is the peculiarity of each field. In this context, the category of “practice,”
which makes the link between the various fields, constitutes the central
operator.
Clearly, we are faced with two different programmes. Bourdieu’s soci-
ology leaves it to historians to study how the conjunctures in which agents
will exercise their habits are changing. Marx’s “historical materialism” is a
theory of the history of societies, including the passage from one form of
society to another, and, more specifically in Capital, a theory of the mod-
ern capitalist form of society and its possible overcoming. Marx thus out-
lines a theory of modern society, or at least of what he judges to be its
central core. Bourdieu’s subject, by contrast, is both a general theory of
social practice, which considers the various practices, for example, eco-
nomics, as special cases, and, on the other hand, a general theory of sociol-
ogy, which goes beyond and reconciles the contrary requirements of
“objectivism” and “subjectivism” (at the time, respectively, represented by
structuralism and phenomenology), associating the point of view of the
structure and that of the individuals, the rules of the institutions and the
quite different rules of concrete practice (Bourdieu 1990: 139–142). In
this regard, Bourdieu tends to reduce Marx to structuralism: according to
 2  BOURDIEU WITH MARX, FROM ECONOMY TO ECOLOGY  33

him, the structural relations that Marx describes prescribe agents’ prac-
tices. In reality, Marx takes the greatest care to show that, while the capi-
talists cannot act other than according to the logic implied in the
competitive relationship—that is, if they are not to disappear outright—
the wage-earners occupy a subaltern position from which they can dis-
tance themselves by engaging in the class struggle. Bourdieu certainly
pushes this analysis of the subjective moment much further than Marx,
through the categories of a “praxeology,” a general theory of practice. But
this, being general, cannot produce a theory of modern society as such.
Bourdieu’s approach pertains to a programme which is that of “sociol-
ogy,” as it was invented in the nineteenth century, in its historical emer-
gence, by its separation from philosophy of history, and also from
economics, whose specific subject is the production, distribution, circula-
tion and consumption of wealth. Marx’s programme shows some kind of
resistance to this epistemic rupture. The key concepts of Capital, such as
“value,” “surplus value,” “exploitation” and “ capital,” are both economic
and political categories. His respective consideration of materialism, of
the productive forces, and of history—the consideration of the sequence of
modes of production—are strongly correlated, since this relationship
between social relations of production and productive forces is fundamen-
tally unstable, subject as it is to an oscillation between reproduction and
transformation. And this is the point on which Marx fixes his attention:
the point from which one can explore the horizon of modernity. It is in
this sense that Marx promotes “historical materialism.” It is clear that
Bourdieu’s structural approach does not nurture the same ambitions.
In other words, the term “reproduction” does not really have the same
meaning in Marx and in Bourdieu. For both of them, of course, structure
is primary. And, consequently, they must explain how the structures hap-
pen to be reproduced. With Bourdieu, this only occurs through the strate-
gies by which agents reproduce in their original position. Such a
reproduction of agents in their position is relatively random; it is linked to
their strategic capacity and to more or less favourable circumstances.
Jumping from one class to another remains an exceptional fact. The field
thus necessarily reproduces itself, generally leading children of a social
class to arrive at the same position as their parents. This approach is not
unrelated to Marx’s: the economic structure reproduces itself, although
the dominant do not all self-reproduce just as they are, because their
reproduction as the dominant presupposes the success of their competitive
strategy. But, at Bourdieu’s level of analysis, where the dominant and the
34  J. BIDET

dominated supposedly return to their position, we remain in a social

“static,” incapable of opening up to a “dynamic,” that is, to a historical
interpretation. As we shall see, this is in fact only possible through the
analysis of the interactions between productive forces and relations of
production.

Capital Endowment: Where Marx and Bourdieu

Split Off
Clearly, when Bourdieu speaks of “capital endowment,” he is giving the
word “capital” a meaning which is not Marx’s own. But this does not
mean that he is using this concept in a purely metaphorical sense. So, it is
worth considering how this interferes with Marx’s problematic.
By advancing this concept, Bourdieu actually brings a new element to
the Marxian approach, a new element which can tend either to neutralize
or to stimulate it. This distinction between two kinds of “endowment,”
one economic, the other cultural, challenges the belief that modern societ-
ies could be defined by their “capitalist” character. In fact, it heralds a
two-fold dominant power: a property-power and a competence-power.
This duality governs two social logics of domination, which rely on two
distinct kinds of “endowment,” that is to say, two forms of “capital,”
which are appropriable by individuals, thus associated in a dominant class.1
“Cultural capital,” as the endowment of a particular person, is guaran-
teed by a cultural power which is exercised not only within the school and
university system, but through all the institutions, public or private, which
have a mandate and authority to distinguish, recognize, crown, include,
exclude—in short, to define “competences.” It is through this institu-
tional analysis that, in comparison with Foucault, Bourdieu shifts from
“knowledge” to “competence,” defining this second power as a state
power. The idea of such a “second power” is not unknown to the Marxist
tradition, where the state is conceived as the political relationship between
classes. In Gramsci one can see these cultural institutions, even if they are
private (schools, churches) referred to as “state apparatuses.” As for
Althusser, he discerns an “ideological” power, that of the “ideological
state apparatus,” which reinforces an economic power. But by taking the

1
 The term “competence,” it should be remembered, does not refer to knowledge as such
(to a “knowledge-power”) but to a social competence-power: that of those who are designated
as “enjoying competency,” where a juridical power is included.
 2  BOURDIEU WITH MARX, FROM ECONOMY TO ECOLOGY  35

economic and the cultural as two kinds of “endowment,” which individu-

als are unequally endowed with, Bourdieu tackles this issue quite differ-
ently: he is interested in a “cultural” power, which is to be considered as
such, for it-self, as the other power, responding to another logic of power.
However, for Bourdieu, this claim of a duality is only the prerequisite
for reunification. In both cases, “capital” is supposedly guaranteed by a
“title,” that is, as the property of specific persons. If “property” means
socially recognized as legitimate power of using a thing, in modern society
this recognition is guaranteed by the state, which validates and asserts
property titles. Therefore, the two kinds of “endowment” similarly come
under state recognition. On the one hand, recognition of private property.
On the other, recognition of competence. Private property governs mar-
ket relations. Competence regulates organized relationships, giving every-
one their place in organizational charts. This attribution of titles in both
cases confers on people a capacity for action and, therefore, for the use of
things, recognized in a more or less determinate area of social life. In mod-
ern society, this recognition is guaranteed by the State (and its “appara-
tuses”), which constitutes and validates the titles of “competence.”
This endowment approach has received a Marxist reception in an “ana-
lytical Marxism” that distinguishes various kinds of “assets” which indi-
viduals are endowed with (Wright 1988, 1997)2. It seems clear, however,
that the concept of “capital endowment” presents certain limits regarding
the conceptual tasks that Marx assigned to “capital.” As for Bourdieu, he
considers both (a) the reproduction of a system of differences in “endow-
ment,” that is to say, of a structure of domination, and (b) the reproduction
of family lines in their endowment, through educational, family, school,
and process. It is in this sense that he studies “reproductive strategies”
(Bourdieu 1996: 263–289). In his approach, these are the two sides of the
same social process: according to the various volumes and forms of endow-
ment which you inherit, you will be provided with habituses which give

2
 Wright’s approach, despite its merits, seems to me to come up against a difficulty inherent
to an “analytical” philosophy, which expresses “social relations” in terms of “inter-individual
relations.” It will be noted that, for the needs of a Marxist analysis, the French language has
at its disposal two distinct terms, that of “relations sociales,” appropriate to relations between
individuals, and that of “rapports sociaux,” appropriate to class, gender or race, that is to say,
structural relations, where English has only one term, that of “relations.” This obviously
presents no insuperable semantic difficulty, but it is significant in terms of different philo-
sophical traditions, which it is important to be aware of.
36  J. BIDET

rise to practices that reproduce the “structure,” in the sense Bourdieu

gave to this term, and determine your position within it.
Marx similarly distinguishes (a) the reproduction of the capitalist struc-
ture from (b) the reproduction of endowment among the particular capi-
talists. But he adds a third consideration: (c) the reproduction of capital.
For him, the capitalists certainly reproduce “as capitalists” by the repro-
duction of their own capital. But these are two separate things. There is an
autonomy of capital, relative to its holder. The problem of reproducing a
particular capital is conceptually distinct from that of reproducing its
owner: see the process of the “extended reproduction,” studied in Volume
I, running from small to large enterprises, which results from an interac-
tion between (competitive) relations of production and (technological)
developments of the productive forces. The analysis of the conditions for
the reproduction of the capitalist structure as a whole is the subject of
Volume 2, while Volume 3 examines the circumstances in which the very
mechanism of capitalism, its extended reproduction, leads eventually to
the ruin of the system. It was by considering this interaction between rela-
tions of production and productive forces that Marx would propose a
theory of modern society which was at the same time a theory of modern
history.
The “contribution” to Marxism that Bourdieu brings here through his
concepts of “cultural capital,” “reproduction” and “endowment” con-
cerns this “other pole” of class domination which makes it impossible to
adequately define modern society as a “capitalist” society. But to be able
to integrate this “contribution” into the edifice of Marxism, it is still nec-
essary to cross some epistemological obstacles and build some conceptual
bridges.

Domination Versus Exploitation

A symptom of the chasm that separates these two authors is the fact that
where the one deals with “exploitation,” the other chooses to speak of
“domination.” This term certainly makes it possible to embrace economic
domination and cultural domination in a single concept. But at what cost?
Let us briefly examine how Marx constructed this concept. In Capital,
whose specific object is the study of the “capitalist mode of production,”
some general concepts, valid for any “mode of production,” are necessar-
ily presupposed. As we have seen, this is particularly the case with the
concept of “mode of production” but also that of “exploitation,” which
 2  BOURDIEU WITH MARX, FROM ECONOMY TO ECOLOGY  37

constitutes its core. Marx thus distinguishes slavery, where all the product
seems to go to the master (we forget that the slave receives something for
his reproduction as a slave), serfdom, where the division is visible between
what the serf gives to the owner and what remains for himself, and capital-
ism where, with labour being supposedly paid at its “value,” exploitation
has supposedly disappeared (Marx 1976: 680). What is common to all
three cases is “exploitation,” rigorously understood as the fact that some
people work longer and others less than the time necessary to produce
what they consume. In the case of capitalism, this can only appear through
a “labor theory of value,” which is the condition for a theory of surplus
value: it makes it possible to distinguish, beyond the wage (relatable to the
working time necessary for the production of the goods that the employee
consumes) an additional working time whose product goes to the capital-
ist owner (this is what transpires from the first five chapters of Volume 3).
Value and surplus value are not categories of economic practice: capitalists
do not need them. These are concepts of the critique of economics, and it
is as such that they have economic significance. They allow us to under-
stand capitalism in its relationship both to exploitation and accumulation,
and more generally in terms of its structure and its history.
It might be said that all this is well known. Known, perhaps, but not
recognized. We “see without seeing,” as Althusser says. In reality, his phe-
nomenon gives rise to a repression which is of the same type as that of
sexuality brought to light by Freud. If Marx’s analysis is correct, there is no
inequality, but only processes of exploitation. This is the fact which radically
escapes consciousness. The idea that, when you work less time than what
is necessary to produce what you consume, you are an exploiter, is truly
untenable. It is, for this reason, absent from ordinary language. And the
very term “exploitation,” in its common usage, carries the most diverse
denotations and connotations which both broaden and weaken it. Marx
gives it its conceptual edge. This can only appear via recourse to a theoreti-
cal construct, which exists as such only on a double condition of consis-
tency and relevance: namely, that from the outset it remains consistent
with its own conceptual unfolding, and that it effectively reveals or makes
visible something of the real which without it would remain invisible or
unknown. And these are the points on which Marx’s theory must be ques-
tioned: in its relevance regarding the data of the various social sciences
(history, sociology, law, psychopathology, etc.), and in its coherence, start-
ing from the concepts to be formulated first. It is on this last point that my
criticism will focus, which will attempt to push the theory of exploitation
38  J. BIDET

further. By instituting “domination” rather than “exploitation” as the key

concept, Bourdieu condemns himself to remain in a grey zone where
domination itself is obscured by an original repression.
What the Marxian theory of surplus value reveals is the “abstract” char-
acter of the logic of exploitation: its fundamental indifference to the fate
of humans and nature. This is the essential point that Marx sets out in a
decisive paragraph which deals with the difference between the “produc-
tion of use value” and the “production of surplus value.”3 Capitalist pro-
duction certainly has to do with use values, since it aims at the production
of commodities. But it is indifferent to the fact that some “commodities”
can be destructive. It aims, in the last analysis, only at maximizing surplus
value, the only way to survive in the competitive struggle. Capital flour-
ishes on misery, deforestation and pollution. It thrives all too well in con-
ditions of global warming. This is the landscape that only the Marxian
theory of exploitation can reveal, in all its social and ecological dimensions.

The Duality
of the Domination-­Exploitation-Destruction Process

This Marxian theory of exploitation, however, cannot be taken as an

objection against Bourdieu’s contribution (or similar approaches) insist-
ing upon the duality of the dominant class, that Marx identifies only
obliquely. But, to account for this duality, it is necessary to approach
things from above. American institutionalism constitutes a first point of
reference here, when it argues that economic theory must start from the
fact that there are only two rational forms of work coordination on a social
scale, namely, the market and the organization. This view is already central
in Marx since the Grundrisse (Marx 1973: 171–2). It governs his entire

3
 It will be noted that, in the French edition (which, as he has underlined, corrects the
earlier German text), Marx modifies the title of this chapter 7, which he entitles “The pro-
duction of use values and the production of surplus value,” and not “The Labor Process and
the Process of producing Surplus Value.” This title, which refers to the “production of use
values,” and not to the “labor process,” is more congruent with the argument he is develop-
ing and more essential to it. It is also the most significant regarding the current situation: we
need only think of the ongoing debates about what is “productive,” “production,” GDP and
so on, where profit contrasts with use value, and nature as the supreme use value to be pro-
tected for itself.
 2  BOURDIEU WITH MARX, FROM ECONOMY TO ECOLOGY  39

theoretical construct, which is based on these two modes of the “division

of labor.” However, his hypothesis is that, with the development of the
large industrial enterprise, it is ultimately the rationality of organization,
gradually extended to an entire society, that will prevail, in the form of
socialism. As we know, in the course of real modern and contemporary
history, the reign of the “organized whole” has been shown to constitute
a catastrophic outcome. Only a certain market/organization duality is
economically “rational.” But we have to confront this inescapable reality:
in modern times these two forms of “coordination at the social scale”
interpenetrate and confront each other as two class factors, giving rise to a
conflict between the two privileged social forces, one endowed with capi-
talist property, which dominates the market, and the other with
“competence.”
One could argue that, over the centuries of modernity and in a time
of ecological decline, it is capital that constitutes the determining ele-
ment. Indeed, modern destructiveness is most clearly manifested in the
capitalist concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few, whose
only compass is profit. However, we cannot stop at this unilateral per-
spective. What Bourdieu’s analysis allows us to better understand—even
if he does not argue this point—is the parallel between competition in
the market and competition within organization.4 That is, the parallel
between the thirst for profit, proper to the shareholder-champion of
extractivism, and the thirst for greatness, proper to generals and admin-
istrators, agents of big projects, national and colonial. On this other pole
of domination, one will thus find, at the height of competence, the
search for “glory,” and, throughout its hierarchy, the obsession with
“distinction,” which also involves a certain lifestyle. Which is to say, a
certain level of consumption, which constitutes the vector, from top to
bottom, of the process of ostentatious expenditure, the absolute ferment
of consumerism. Crossing this vector with the abstract logic of capital
commits the human species to disaster.

4
 It will be noted, here again, that the French language specifically uses “concurrence” in
the case of the market and “competition” with regard to organization—where English has
only one term, “competition,” at its disposal for two different concepts—underlining a con-
ceptual distinction.
40  J. BIDET

Bourdieu with Marx in an Ecological Perspective

As against the privileged, we can now better consider the other class, which
I call “le commun du peuple” (the common of the people), that is, the
great mass of the unprivileged, which does not mean to say powerless: they
count in history (Bidet 2022). But how?
We may seem to be stuck in a double impasse. With Bourdieu, we are
locked into a problematic of the continuous reproduction of dominations.
With Marx, we will only succeed in an illusory outcome, in the passage
from the reign of the market to the reign of organization. Neither of them
seems to open up to a strategy of emancipation. In my view, it is necessary
to confront this aporia without regressing conceptually even further,
below this duality. The institutionalist adage that “there are only two
modes of rational work coordination on a social scale, the market and the
organization” only makes sense if it is anchored in a point of origin. There
is actually an earlier, primary possibility, which is not “the gift and the
counter-gift.” Polanyi puts this idea forward but as part of a historical
approach. But here, with regard to modern structural logic, what we find
below market and organization is the discursive coordination between
associated partners, as defined by Elinor Ostrom in the concept of the
“common” or by Habermas in the concept of “communicative action.” A
rigorous critical reference to these two authors would naturally require
long explanations.5 To stick to a strict conceptual space, I will say that the
modern structure of society, as a class structure, supposes a “metastruc-
ture,” which is not its “foundation,” but rather the necessary reference for
the actors involved. This presupposition of the modern social order, this
“common sense” which both Rawls and Marx speak of (deriving very dif-
ferent elaborations from this, it is true), is the conviction that we are “free
and equal,” and then committed to governing ourselves by the “dis-
course,” equally shared by all. This has nothing to do with idealism: this
fact of such a “common sense” is remembered, from below, in all modern
class struggles (and indeed, also gender struggles, though this consider-
ation exceeds the limits of the present article6).
This assumption is not the “foundation” of modern society. It is not a
matter of the “values” upon which “modern society” is purportedly based.
To put it in Hegel’s language, it is a “posed presupposition”: it is the

5
 See Théorie générale (Bidet 1999). Section 72, pp. 323–343 is devoted to Rawls. Section
91, pp. 401–430, to Habermas.
6
 See L’État-monde (Bidet 2011), chapitre 5, Sexe, classe, “race”: Rapports sociaux
consubstantiels.
 2  BOURDIEU WITH MARX, FROM ECONOMY TO ECOLOGY  41

product of the modern class struggle. And it is an open presupposition. In

the complexity of modern society, beyond what the discussion between
supposedly free and equal humans can directly establish (by rules or regu-
lations in the various fields of social life), this is the alternative they face:
as for the rest, which exceeds immediate discourse interaction, the ques-
tion is, what will be handed respectively to the market or to organization?
Critical thought, which adopts the perspective of emancipation, that is,
the abolition of class and gender domination, cannot do away with this
modern fact of a duality of class factors. In this sense, I have designated the
modern class structure as that of a “triangular duel”: two classes are facing
each other, but the one above includes two components, opening up to
problems of alliance as well as conflict. It is only on this ground that the
modern struggle for emancipation from class and gender relations can be
understood. Capital-power is an essentially mute or deceptive power.
Competence-power, by contrast, can only be exercised, can only assert
itself, by explaining, in some regard by exposing itself. And thus, formi-
dable as it is, it remains more vulnerable, potentially subject to some con-
trol by the common people, to some kind of alliance in the context of
capitalist domination.
It is in this sense that we can question Bourdieu when he evokes the
figure of the “man of science,” scientist or intellectual, whose interest is
truth, the “universal” (Bidet 2011). From a metastructural ecological per-
spective, the question must be taken quite differently. Marx explains, at
the end of Volume 1, that in the large industrial enterprise, as it takes the
form of a unified technical-scientific process, the workers are more and
more numerous, “formed, united and organized” by the very process of
production, so that they eventually become capable of taking the lead of
the entire organization (Marx 1976: 927–931). In reality, we arrive now
at a situation that is both analogical and opposite. The process of the disas-
ter has started to “educate” and “unite” us. As for this “universality,”
which is supposed to bring us together, faced with an enduring bipolar
dominant class it can only proceed from the strengthening of a discursive
framework common to humanity. At this ultimate stage of modernity,
when the “old” modern class structure, far from disappearing, becomes
gradually established on a world scale, the way to the universal can still be
conceived only within the triangular duel, in the form of a struggle-­alliance
between the common of the people and the “competent.” Once scientists
have explained about global warming, the disappearance of species, pollu-
tion and rising waters, things become simpler, and humans more edu-
cated. The common of the people is beginning to be able to take the
42  J. BIDET

initiative, not in order to master or control natural processes but to pro-

tect the planet from the evils of class (gender, national) domination. Its
political axiom can only be “controlling the market by the organization,
and controlling organization by the free and equal discourse shared
between associated producers-consumers,” and not coming together
under the aegis of the Enlightenment, of scientists or intellectuals—that is,
of an order whose apogee, in Bourdieu, ironically takes the figure of the
great sociologist. The common people face the competence-power as the
other class power. The question is how to act universally to free the com-
petent from their connection to the blind power of capital, and to hege-
monize them in a last class struggle-alliance. This, at least, is the only
conceivable perspective for thinking about the emancipation of the human
community and the defence of the natural order.

References
Bidet, Jacques. 1999. Théorie générale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
———. 2005 [2001]. Bourdieu and Historical Materialism. Translated by Gregory
Eliot. In Contemporary Marxism: A Critical Reader, eds. Bidet Jacques and
Stathis Kouvelak, 567–604. Leiden: Brill
———. 2011 [1996]. L’universel comme fin et comme commencement. Actuel
Marx, 20, Autour de Pierre Bourdieu, 135–148. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France: Bidet, Jacques. 2011. L’État-monde. Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France.
———. 2016 [2015]. Foucault with Marx. Translated by S. Corcoran. London.
Zed Books.
———. 2022. L’Écologie Politique du Commun du Peuple. Paris: Le Croquant.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977 [1971]. Reproduction. Translated by R. Nice. London: Sage.
———. 1984 [1979]. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.
Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1990 [1980]. The Logic of Practice. Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge: Polity.
———. 1991 [1969]. The Love of Art. Cambridge. Polity.
———. 1996 [1989]. State Nobility, Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Translated
by L. C. Clough. Cambridge: Polity.
Marx, Karl. 1973 [1939]. Grundrisse. Translated by M.  Nicolaus.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
———. 1976. Capital, Volume 1. Translated by B. Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
———. 1998 [1845]. The German Ideology. Amherst, N. Y.: Prometheus Books.
Wright, Erik Olin. 1988. Classes. London: Verso.
———. 1997. Class Counts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 CHAPTER 3

Violence, Symbolic Violence

and the Decivilizing Process: Approaches
from Marx, Elias and Bourdieu

Bridget Fowler

Introduction: Bourdieu as Marx’s Heir

The founding sociologists agreed that capitalist modernity is premised on
production for peaceful profit-making. Marx, of course, fully recognized
that the primitive accumulation of capital had been via the seizure of first
nations’ lands, slavery and the breaching by gunboats of the “Chinese
walls” against trade.1 Nevertheless, his general law of capital accumulation

A version of this chapter has appeared in German, see Fowler (2008): the present
version is substantially revised.

1
 Federici (2014) has argued persuasively that imperialist and neo-imperialist relations con-
tinue to provoke similar forms of primitive accumulation, noting twentieth and twenty-first
century enclosures in Africa and Southern Asia.

B. Fowler (*)
Department of Sociology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
e-mail: Bridget.Fowler@glasgow.ac.uk

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 43

Switzerland AG 2022
G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and
Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_3
44  B. FOWLER

was predicated on peaceful production (1976: 873–6, 925, 2007: 3–47).

Moreover, he insisted on the contrast between the truly “revolutionary”
pursuit of productivity through the extraction of “relative surplus value”
by means of the detail division of labour, science and technology, as against
the extraction of “absolute surplus value” via the discipline of the whip or
extended hours (1976: 5–3, 507; 643–663).
Bourdieu writes very little about domination by the direct threat of
violence, as in feudalism or absolutism. Certainly, he had witnessed in
person the Algerians’ anti-imperialist struggle. He fully realized how
French power, maintained from the onset of Algerian colonization (1830)
by superior military force, had also become the pedestal for the highly
mechanized capitalist agriculture of the settlers’ lands (2003: 34). Yet his
own sociology of power focuses less on coercive domination than on sym-
bolic violence, encompassing various forms. It is this that is at stake in the
gentle violence perpetrated by the Kabylian “great families” who, from the
pre-colonial period, had benefitted from the doxic naturalizing of their
own privileged position by means of their rural gift economy so as to
acquire symbolic capital (1990a: 119–21, 148; 2008a: 70, 103–4). It is,
of course, at stake in the reproduction of the French dominant class by
means of universal education and national examinations (cf. 1996b: 261).
Here the art of symbolic violence consists in inculcating shame in the sub-
ordinate classes for their “lack of culture” whilst perpetuating the merito-
cratic myth that the culture in which the dominant class has been educated
and tested is equally available to all.2 For these reasons, structural transfor-
mations are rare3:

The force of the social world resides in this orchestration of unconscious

minds, mental structures. Now there is nothing more difficult to revolution-
ize than mental structures. This is why revolutions often fail in the project
of making a new man. (2014: 145)

In this chapter, I aim, first, to justify the argument that Bourdieu’s

sociology is in the same Enlightenment scientific tradition as that of Marx
(cf. Fowler 2011). Secondly, given this common line of descent, I shall
address the work of Norbert Elias, who was also deeply influenced by
2
 For an influential critique of “meritocratic illusions” citing Bourdieu, see Piketty 2020:
709–713, 716.
3
 Nevertheless, against the received view that Bourdieu is simply a theorist of reproduction,
I argue that his sociology does offer a theory of social transformation (see Fowler 2020).
 3  VIOLENCE, SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AND THE DECIVILIZING PROCESS…  45

Marx, as well as by Freud. Thirdly, I shall argue that Bourdieu’s sociology

has certain telling affinities with Elias’s theory of the civilizing process and
its historical vicissitudes.
Marx’s fundamental concern was demystification, particularly of eco-
nomic ideology. Paradoxically, he undertakes this destruction of secular
scholarly myths by frequently deploying a religious or magical language,
as, for example: “For modern society, gold is its Holy Grail” (1976: 230),
or his perception that the commodity form possesses “metaphysical sub-
tleties and theological niceties” (1976: 163). Indeed, the drive to create
exchange-value (M—C—M′) rather than use-value is characterized by
Marx as a mystery, equivalent to that of the Holy Trinity:

It [capital] differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus value

just as God the Father differentiates himself from God the Son, although
both are of the same age and form, in fact, one single person…. (1976: 256)

We note, again, that the national debt is said to produce, for the
“bankocracy,” “capital fallen from heaven” (1976: 919). Further, as we
shall see, Bourdieu deploys a similarly ironic, defamiliarizing language that
serves to unveil social reality.4
Marx’s method is to show the deeper structural forces and relations
that exist beneath appearances. For example, colonialists in Australia, pos-
sessing money and machines but lacking wage-labourers, discovered
quickly that “capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons
which is mediated through things” (1976: 932, my emphasis); for “capital
ceases to be capital without wage-labour” (1973b: 278). Relational theo-
ries are necessary but not sufficient: such analyses must also be historically
situated. Thus Marx honours Adam Smith and David Ricardo who stand
on the shoulders of the “eighteenth century prophets.” He notes, how-
ever, that although Smith and Ricardo grasp the profound rupture with
feudal relations in the bourgeois economy, they are hamstrung by their
ahistorical idealization of the new forces of production (1973b: 83).
In not dissimilar terms, Bourdieu satirizes the “(John Stuart) Millian”
utilitarianism that fails to grasp the epoch-making changes in historical

4
 Although less focused on economic capital alone, Bourdieu shares with Marx a funda-
mental division between the production for production’s sake of modern capitalism and
pre-capitalist societies’ logic of the philia (community) (Marx 1976: 742, Bourdieu 2008a:
246–250).
46  B. FOWLER

conditions, such as those creating the emergence of insurance societies—

money, printing, law, capitalist ethos—that led to changes in habitus. It is
this habitus, for example, that impelled British schoolboys in 1950s’
Lowestoft to form a club to insure themselves financially against being
beaten by teachers (2008a: 87, 246–8). Habitus is not a concept used by
Marx, but his emphasis on a historical framework to understand practice is
certainly fundamental. More specifically, like Marx, Bourdieu retains
throughout his life a notion of “prophetic” agents of transformation, reli-
gious and secular.5
As is well known, Marx ridicules those nineteenth-century vulgar econ-
omists who view the key to capitalists’ profits as due to their ascetic absti-
nence: their “martyrdom” (1976: 745) or their “genius” (1976: 485). For
Marx’s break with methodological individualism allows him to see that
personal asceticism is nothing without what he terms the real “magic”: the
social relations of wage-labour in which workers daily perform surplus-­
labour, working longer hours than they are paid for in wages. Such
“magic” creates the surplus value which “brings forth living offspring or
at least lays golden eggs” (1976: 255).
Similarly, yet in relation to the very different field of cultural produc-
tion, Bourdieu emphasizes that art historians are too prone to resort to
magical or quasi-religious interpretations of creation. They invoke
“genius,” a term that originally carried a connotation of divine inspiration;
alternatively, they adopt simplistic explanations in terms of “innate” talent
(1971: 1359, 1991: 110). Bourdieu counters these transcendental or
eugenic conceptions by uncovering the real determinants of artistic cre-
ativity: long years of education, availability of free time and a collective
belief in art permitting artists’ production of “art for art’s sake” (1996a).
Similarly, he defamiliarizes the exchanges through which modernist works
find a market, stressing the concealed role of the gallerist in the “alchemi-
cal” “transmutation” of art into money. Note, on this, that Marx had
emphasized in the Grundrisse (1857–1858) that contemporary artists may
have to create their own demand or produce their own consumers:

The object of art—like every other product—creates a public which is sensi-

tive to art and enjoys beauty. Production thus not only creates an object for
the subject, but also a subject for the object. (1973b: 92, also 93)

5
 I have developed this argument elsewhere (Fowler 2011, 2020).
 3  VIOLENCE, SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AND THE DECIVILIZING PROCESS…  47

Bourdieu takes this on but frames it in terms of Marx’s notion of

“mediation.” He elaborates on it with his concept of cultural fields—artis-
tic, legal and so on: key mediating institutions that have achieved signifi-
cant degrees of autonomy from the market’s profit constraints (1996a).
Further, it is Marx who first initiated the concept of reproduction, with
his insistence that the social relations of modernity are not natural but are
those of individuals in mutual relationships: “which they equally repro-
duce and produce anew” … “even as they renew the world of wealth they
create” (1973b: 712). Bourdieu elaborates on Marx’s notion of reproduc-
tion as requiring the “transmission and accumulation of skills from one
generation to another” (Marx 1976: 719), which for the most part
requires no outlay of capital since “the capitalist may safely leave this to the
worker’s drives for self-preservation and propagation” (1976: 718). Thus
Bourdieu and Passeron contend (1990: 55) that the educational system
certainly performs the relatively autonomous work of schooling by incul-
cating legitimate culture. But attention is often displaced—due to “the
happy unconsciousness of elective affinities”—from the fact that “the con-
ditions for acquiring [distinction] are monopolized by the dominant
classes” (1990: 198; see also Bourdieu 1990a: 160–161).
It is telling, too, that although, Bourdieu avowed his specific debt to
both Husserl and Heidegger on the phenomenology of time, Marx had
earlier addressed time, too (1973b: 172–3, 711,712, cf. Postone 1996).
Thus, for example, Marx notes that the “problem of time” in capitalism—
production time and circulation time—is “the ultimate question to which
all economy reduces itself” (1973b: 29). When Bourdieu emphasizes that
the analysis of dispositions towards time is fundamental for a critical politi-
cal economy of the different social classes, he may be thinking of Marx as
well as the German phenomenologists (1984: 350–357, 2008a: 75–111).6
Yet Bourdieu’s conception of time is also crucial for his divergence from
the Marx of 1848 and particularly from Marx’s and Engels’s hopeful asser-
tion of the proletariat as historically predestined to act as the grave-diggers
of the bourgeoisie. He writes of the tension in Marx between sociological
realism and utopia: a tension evident in his own sociology too. For
Bourdieu had seen in Algeria a mass of ex-peasants, on the roads and in
the cities, who were experiencing absolute poverty. All too aware of their

6
 In a different context, it is also important for understanding the nature of gift exchange
(Bourdieu 1977, 2017). He refers particularly to the exchange of equivalents in gift exchange
which is misrecognized by the gap in time between gift and counter-gift.
48  B. FOWLER

own suffering, many of them, nevertheless, failed to identify their eco-

nomic alienation with a specific social system. This, Bourdieu adds, is an
extra dimension of alienation which is often left unexplored by Marxists.
Instead, in what Bourdieu calls an “essentialist miserabilism” (2008a:
211), displaced peasants see their misery as caused by their own failings,
by an unfortunate fate, or by the absence of a string-pulling patron, whilst
their indignation becoming wasted in the search for immediate sustenance
(2008a: 212, 215). Hence in his Algerian stay (1955–1960), Bourdieu
anticipates a better-placed Algerian urban working-class, with greater
security in the present, whose sense of time would permit them to forge a
“rational revolutionary consciousness” (2008a: 120).
In France, in contrast, in the post-war “trentes glorieuses” (glorious
thirty years) where such conditions, in terms of time, were present, union-
ization as well as nominally anti-capitalist parties had become increasingly
powerful. But the dominants’ mechanisms of control served ultimately to
defuse workers’ radical opposition, resulting in a working-class “world”
of social housing and of State benefits as an armour against absolute pov-
erty. In the period of writing Distinction (1984 [1979]), wage increases
secured enough for the “velvet glove” of the market (1984: 154) to dis-
tract workers to some degree from deep structural inequalities; in turn,
their perception of their own cultural intimidation undermined any
mounting challenge to the dominants’ class reproduction (1984: 251).
Yet, beginning from the late 1970s, there was another “end of a world”—
not the peasant world, but that of the unionized, municipally housed,
working-class world (Bourdieu 2005: 11–12; Bourdieu et al. 1999: 6–13,
317–337). Then the tragic issue of time re-emerged. “Temporary” and
other casualized workers, so precarious that the collectivist responses of
trade unions had become difficult, became reduced to the condition of
those Algerian ex-peasants he had studied earlier (354–6). Increasingly,
their anger at inequality and injustice was split between anti-immigrant Le
Front Nationale politics on the one hand; social democratic welfarism, and
left-wing unionism on the other (187–8).
We shall argue in this chapter that Bourdieu’s method—his historical or
genetic constructivism—has ultimately the same objective as that posited
by Marx for materialism in relation to Hegel: that of discovering the
“rational kernel within the mystical shell” (1976: 20). Indeed, Bourdieu’s
inheritance from Marx is explicitly reaffirmed late in his life when he
endorses the labour theory of value (Bourdieu 2000: 202–5). But, unlike
many of Marx’s heirs, he always regarded his heritage from Marx as
 3  VIOLENCE, SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AND THE DECIVILIZING PROCESS…  49

enhanced by an indebtedness to other thinkers, too, including other

canonical social theorists: “[Y]ou can think with Marx against Marx or
with Durkheim against Durkheim, and also, of course, with Marx and
Durkheim against Weber, and vice versa” (1990b: 49; cf. Bourdieu and
Passeron 1990: 4–5). My major focus here, then, is on Bourdieu’s further
debt, to the Marxist-Freudian, Norbert Elias (1897–1990), educated in
Wroclaw and Frankfurt.

Elias: Civilization, Culture

and Counter-Civilizing Spurts

Elias strikingly clarifies the sociogenesis of the transition from military to

symbolic violence. Crucially, he analyses in detail the emergence of the sta-
ble, centralized state-formations that Marx had presupposed as one of the
required conditions for continuous capitalist production. He focuses his
greatest works—The Court Society (2006), The Civilizing Process (2000)
and The Germans (1996)—on the civilizing process itself: most notably,
the emergence of, first, a pacified nobility, then, a bourgeoisie—and, sub-
sequently, a working class—with a greater shame threshold. But he also
addressed decivilizing processes, as bourgeois democratic societies proved
vulnerable to eruptions of open violence, even to State-engineered
genocide.7
Bourdieu and Elias possessed major points of agreement, as was clearly
acknowledged in Bourdieu’s tribute at Elias’s 90th birthday (Mennell
1992: 25). Elias’s fascinating account of the sublimation of drives provides
a detailed socio-historical supplement to Freud’s undifferentiated notion
of “civilization.” Elias shows how inhibition occurs gradually through the
repression and discipline of physical expressions of aggression and sexual-
ity. But whilst, in our post-Freudian societies, we are vividly aware of the
instilling of toilet training and manners in each individual child, we are
less aware of the historical sequence in the suppression of specific desires,
Elias’s “sociogenetic” process of civilization. Bourdieu accepts crucial ele-
ments of this process, not least the controls over purely physical

7
 Imperial administration often revealed the naked coercive power behind the rule of law
(Arendt 2017). In this sense decivilizing actions behind the scenes often accompanied the
theatrical staging of the colonial powers’ peaceful rule as the gift of civilization. For a brilliant
account of the superseding of class conflict by ethnosocial conflict, leading, in specified cir-
cumstances, to genocide, see Mann (2005).
50  B. FOWLER

demonstrations of noble honour, and the increasing relegation of such

prowess to hegemonic working-class masculinity (Bourdieu 1993b, 2001;
Hadas 2019).
In all these areas, the two sociologists seek to develop a relational
(Bourdieu) or “figurational” (Elias) analysis which extends beyond Marx
to show how relations of domination and subordination are reproduced,
yet the direct and ubiquitous resort to violence—as in slave society—is
ruled out. Both commented on the high degree of repression in the capi-
talism of their time yet saw the potential beyond it for the future inhibition
of human drives to be “less damaging to […] chances of enjoyment”
(Elias 2000: 446). Notably, Elias saw the imposition of inhibitions as
occurring to a much greater degree than is necessary for social coopera-
tion due to struggles for power between the major classes (2000: 446–7).
Similarly, Bourdieu observes how rigorously ascetic is the work discipline
of grandes écoles’ students, due especially to their competitive ethos
(1996b: 110). But we need first to read Elias more closely in order to fully
evaluate Bourdieu’s debt to him.

The Court Society

Elias’s first book, The Court Society (2006 [1933]), is a fascinating analysis
of the new social “figuration” of absolutism. Elias shows how a series of
changes came together at the end of medieval society to create a political
transformation parallel to the economic transformation from feudalism to
capitalism. In turn, the absolutist power of the monarchy—particularly
from Henri IV to Louis XIV—forced a reordering of the class structure
(2006: 47). Elias scrutinizes the economic and political structures that
generated the “competitive hothouse” of the new court society, not least
the absolutist monarch’s monopolization of the means of violence. He
focuses especially on the unification of the French nation-state, the unprec-
edented levy of taxes on the peasantry to finance monarchical rule, and the
expensive sequestration of the aristocracy at court. The former warlords,
commanded to dissolve their militias, lost along with them the reproduc-
tive practices training them for warfare: drilling, jousting, duelling.
Instead, the imposition of an elaborate, time-consuming dress and eti-
quette kept the aristocracy themselves subjugated, their “weapons reduced
to words” (Elias 2006: 231).
Within this courtly world, superiority was demonstrated via the enact-
ment of non-violent but elaborate rituals, permitting the pursuit of
 3  VIOLENCE, SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AND THE DECIVILIZING PROCESS…  51

sublimated class interests in the form of aristocratic status honour. The

peasantry fed a leisure class dedicated to conspicuous luxury, dispossessed
of its earlier political and material autonomy:

It [luxury] is an indispensable instrument in maintaining their social posi-

tion, especially when—as is the case in this court society—all members of
the society are involved in a ceaseless struggle for status and prestige.
(Elias 2006: 70)

The nobility’s social life, close, physically, to the charismatic king, had
established a widening gulf between the court and the common people,
thus further facilitating their oppression (2006: 53). The “people,”
remarks Elias, strikingly, now existed like another race (sic). An aristocratic
woman, appearing in front of her male servant naked, might reprimand
him for pouring her a scalding bath: he did not count for her as a full sexual
subject (2006: 53, see also 1996: 35). In not dissimilar terms, Bourdieu
alludes throughout his works to “class racism” (see, for example, 1984:
179, 2008c).
Yet court society permitted the upward mobility of one new class frac-
tion: the most affluent of the bourgeoisie, the lawyers or noblesse de robe
(2006: 68). This cultural and bureaucratic elite created a decisive break
with the older warrior aristocracy (the noblesse d’épée) (2006: 69).
Flourishing, due to their specialist occupational skills, they were free of the
costly sociability of the older nobility.
Elias broaches here a number of themes that appear later as key con-
cepts in Bourdieu’s sociology. First, we note the insistence on agents’
strategies of distinction, especially through obligatory high expenditure
(Elias 2006: 75–7, cf. Bourdieu (citing Elias) 1984: 374–5, 468–70;
1998: 69–71). Nobody can be outside this game, comments Bourdieu, even
the King is forced to maintain the ceremonies characteristic of this micro-
cosm (Elias 2006: 151, Bourdieu 1980: 7, cf. Bourdieu 1984: 54). Elias’s
absolutist king is an actor who accumulates social energies (Elias 2006:
143). Similarly, this materialist conception of the accumulation of others’
social energies appears in Bourdieu (1983).
Second, where Elias shows the mounting power of the noblesse de
robe, Bourdieu also notes that this legal group moved from the King’s
private household to become public servants within the increasingly
autonomous state (Bourdieu 2014). Emphasizing the centrality of law to
modern capitalist societies, he focuses on the specific contradictions of the
52  B. FOWLER

legal nobility, not least, their professional adoption of a universalist ethos

combined with the narrow reproduction of their privileges within their
own families (2014: 342).
Third, the whole microcosm of “court society” revolves on its axis
through consumption (Elias 2006: 75). Yet amongst the “symbolic goods”
prized at court are those that graphically lay bare the aristocracy’s hidden
spiritual “point d’honneur.” In particular, Poussin’s oil painting, with its
pastoral nostalgia, is interpreted as an expression of covert resistance to
stifling court conventions (2006: 231, 278). Indeed, Elias’s phrase, spiri-
tual “point d’honneur”—whilst unattributed, may well come from Marx’s
well-known description of religion as humanity’s “spiritualistic point
d’honneur”:

[Religion] is the general theory of this world […] its logic in popular form,
its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its sol-
emn complement, its general ground of consolation and justification. (Marx
1973a: 244)

In turn, this Marxist/Eliasian insight may have prompted Bourdieu’s

broader formulation:

The cult of art and the artist… is one of the necessary components of the
bourgeois art of living, to which it brings a “supplément d’âme”, its spiritu-
alistic point of honour. (1993a: 44)8

Crucially, for Elias, secularized art forms offer aristocrats an inner self-­
justification. Similarly, for Bourdieu (quoting Elias 2006), the back-stage
function of consecrated art is to bind cohesively its cultivated consumers,
however democratic its front-stage presentation (1984: 227 see also 229).
Fourth, and even more important, there are parallels between Elias’s
and Bourdieu’s conceptual language. In particular, there appears in Elias’s
Court Society a straightforward use of the Latin term “habitus,” as when
he observes that the entire habitus (life-style) of the nobility changes when
they are sequestered at court (2006: 262 cf. also Elias 1991b). Bourdieu,
for his part, elaborates on the concept of habitus throughout his life, end-
ing notably with the crystallization of the term “habitus clivé” or frag-
mented habitus (2000: 64, 160, 2004: 111).

8
 I have developed these points earlier: see Fowler (2011).
 3  VIOLENCE, SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AND THE DECIVILIZING PROCESS…  53

Elias’s The Civilizing Process (2000 [1936])

Norbert Elias was to take up these themes again when he emphasizes the
underlying control of drives, by way of three linked processes: courtesy,
civility and civilization (2000). Mining Erasmus’s De Civilitate Morum
Puerilium (1530) and subsequent etiquette manuals, The Civilizing
Process argues that the particular mode of Western civilization is far from
being socially necessary. In particular, it has its excesses, deriving from
interpersonal tensions and inner fears (2000: 445–7). Yet he does not
want simply to revisit the “end of happiness” in modernity which had been
Freud’s subject (1930). Rather, he wants to elucidate how civilization
came into being, pinpointing the aristocracy as the first class to introduce
an accentuated control over drives. In particular, Erasmus’s code of courtly
manners (courtesy) contained explicit rules forbidding acts such as spit-
ting on the table, looking at a person who is defecating, passing a knife
with the blade uppermost and putting chewed food back into the com-
mon dish. A whole range of everyday practices removes commonplace acts
into the category of “polluting,” such as appearing in the street in one’s
nightgown or speaking about prostitutes. Later, the bourgeoisie also took
over these prohibitions, as a new code of morals.
Elias’s analysis throughout The Civilizing Process is weakened method-
ologically by being derived from textual evidence alone and, substantively,
by his greater attention to masculine subjects.9 Nevertheless, his central
theme is compelling. The bearers of these manners or moral codes man-
aged to pass them down, including to the more rebellious lower classes.
Tellingly, they come to be seen as marks of a national habitus—as in
“British self-restraint” (Elias 2000: 428)—or even the marks of humanity.
For example—until the 1960s and the availability of contraception—the
rule requiring abstinence from sexual relations before marriage was viewed
as civilized human behaviour, especially for women (cf. Federici 2014:
85–117). Indeed, an amnesia develops which obscures the fact that the
rules of social life had ever been different. Elias notes perceptively that

9
 For example, the taboo on women being seen breast-feeding in public goes unmen-
tioned, although paintings would suggest that the prohibition dated only from the eigh-
teenth century. The segregation of menstruation and childbirth within an inner sanctum is
also unmentioned: this may have predated courtly prohibitions. The “civilized” denial of
women’s capacity to make legal contracts or to speak in public also go unnoticed, although
Elias partly compensated for this silence with his fascinating essay on The Changing Balance
of Power between the Sexes (1998: 187–214).
54  B. FOWLER

habits, such as teeth-cleaning, become literally incorporated, exerting obe-

dience via bodily compulsions (2000: 118–121, 415–7). Nor should these
codes be understood as simply negative: they have profound unanticipated
consequences. Most remarkably, the inhibition of drives creates greater
depth of character or “psychologization” (2000: 397–414, see also
Bourdieu 1996b: 35–6). Such repression opens up time: it facilitates the
use of time for personal investment in competitive professional fields or for
the rigorous discipline of petty-bourgeois capital accumulation (Elias
2000: 425–6; cf. Bourdieu 1974, 1984: 164–5, 183, 253–4).
Elias’s sociology makes a fundamental division between worldly “civili-
zation,” characteristic of the French aristocracy, in which the noble virtues
of wit, charm and fashion are prized, and the “culture” (kultur) of the
progressive German bourgeoisie, more inward and intellectual. Elias notes
in The Civilizing Process that German kultur flourished in the eighteenth
century (2000: 16–18). However, with the nineteenth-century reasser-
tion of the authoritarian political power of the military Prussian nobility,
kultur was shunted into a mandarin siding, menaced even within the uni-
versities (Elias 1996, 2000: especially 19–20, 24–26; Ringer 1969). So it
was to be Count Bismarck and his Junker nobility who instigated German
industrialization. The process has been aptly described by Gramsci and
others as a “passive revolution”: a revolution from above rather than
below (Thomas 2010: 145–7; Davidson 2012: 308–24).
It is this conflict between the different stakes of cultural capital—inher-
ent in civilization and kultur—that Bourdieu addresses brilliantly in
Distinction (1984: 73–4; 492–4, cf. Loyal 2004: 138) and The State
Nobility (1996). For what is at issue in the “new mode of reproduction of
class,” examined by Bourdieu, post-1968, is precisely the decline of the
old mode: the French protagonists of mandarin kultur—autonomous
Republican philosophers, like Sartre and de Beauvoir, or earlier, in the
nineteenth century, those modernist writers prepared to go to prison, such
as Baudelaire, Flaubert and Zola. Instead, the new agents,10 whilst still the
bearers of an aesthetic attitude prioritizing style, now embody a cult of
luxurious consumption (1984: 54, 77 and 371). Bourdieu is emphatic
that he drew on Elias’s Court Society to point to the unexpected renewal
of elements of seventeenth-century courtly civilization within twentieth-­
century market-colonized societies (1984). Indeed, when Bourdieu

10
 The new agents are the heirs of a similar Grand Ecole-based reproduction but with a
greater family component in their inheritance.
 3  VIOLENCE, SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AND THE DECIVILIZING PROCESS…  55

invokes Elias’s celebrated contrast between kultur and civilization (1984,

1991), he usually alludes—like Elias on late nineteenth-century Germany—
to the decline of Kantian-type kultur. It is this that is at stake in the dan-
gerous erosion, post-1960s, of the “restricted field” of cultural production
(1996a: 344–5, 2008b), as well as in the changed hierarchical positions
between the grandes écoles, not least the eclipse of L’École Normale
Supérieure (established 1794–1795) by the later L’École Nationale
d’Administration (established 1945) (1996b: 331–335, 338–9).
Elias’s last great work was The Germans (1996). Until that point, Elias
might have been justifiably criticized for underplaying the “dark side of
civilization.” For his “dialectic of modernity” neglects the historical evi-
dence that self-restraint in one area can be accompanied by barbarism in
another (Krieken 1998). This reproach cannot be made after The
Germans (1996).
Elias’s main argument here is that State unification occurred in Germany
by means of a military aristocracy. Far from blending with the peaceful
“kultur” of the German urban middle classes, that nobility succeeded in
“brutalizing” the bourgeoisie, even within the universities. In particular, it
sustained its own secret cult of duelling, together with the honorific
imperatives of requiring “satisfaction”—or “making men”11—characteris-
tic of student fraternities.
Driven by a German “habitus of national humiliation” from the
seventeenth-­century Thirty Years’ War onwards, the Weimar Republic
(1918–1933) and its vicissitudes are well-documented by Elias (1996:
6,178,183). In particular, the bitter aftermath of the First World War
defeat, together with the intense class polarization of the new German
Republic, led disciplined but disaffected workers in their millions to turn
to an ultimately unsuccessful German revolution (1917–1924) (Broué
2006). But the defeat also precipitated the violence of the Freikorps, the
deracinated militias beyond the control of the State (Elias 1996, Broué
2006). The aristocratic strand of this Freikorps counter-revolution was
later to turn to the Nazis. In Elias’s view, the German State was caught in
class contradictions so profound that the Germans’ national habitus was
11
 Bourdieu also analyses masculine domination (2001). However, as Hadas has argued
(2019), he needs to distinguish different forms of feudal masculinity. The masculinity that
Bourdieu mainly writes about—associated with violence and warfare—relates more to the
medieval knightly ethos; the masculinity of the clergy—often from the same aristocratic
class—is more peaceful and intellectual. It is this clerical masculinity that is more often passed
down at a later period to the bourgeois male.
56  B. FOWLER

affected, notably in the policy of the extermination camps. It is within

these circumstances—not all of their own choosing—that Elias contextu-
alizes the “break with civilization.” For him, this rupture was provoked by
the oscillation between the Germans’ “collective narcissism” and their
deep-rooted “collective self-hate” (Elias 1996: 320–22). Importantly,
Nazism represented two forms of thought combined together: ideology,
but also utopia, heightening for many its allure (Elias 1996: 286, 288).
How adequate is this Eliasian account of the decivilizing process? Elias
represents a mid-way position between Ernst Nolte—or the argument for
German exceptionalism—and Zymunt Bauman, whose powerful account
of the Holocaust roots it in the amorality of bureaucratic rationality, a
structural characteristic of modernity itself. Yet although historically illu-
minating, Elias ultimately fails to anchor class contradictions sufficiently
within the unstable character of the German capitalist economy. Of course,
he mentions high unemployment, but he underplays the structural origins
of this crisis within the increased concentration and rationalization of pro-
duction, the deflation following earlier inflation, together with the col-
lapse of stock market credit (Broué 2006; Varoufakis 2017). These
processes accentuated the forebodings of the threatened lower middle
class: the electoral heartland of National Socialism (Callinicos 2001: 395).
Further, the greatest capitalist enterprises initially distanced themselves,
then turned to support the Nazis (Callinicos 2001: 396–7; Kershaw 1989:
42–50). Indeed, large companies continued to give sustained psychologi-
cal support to the Nazi political leadership even in 1941, when the Nazi
inner circle adopted a politics of exterminism beyond the call of corporate
economic interests (Callinicos 2001: 397).
Casting Nazism simply as a version of resurrected absolutism, Elias’s
explanation fails to capture the Nazis’ specific political interests in the main-
tenance of State power. Moreover, such underlying political interests also
became converted into distinctive economic/managerial interests as the
Party apparatus took over directly certain key areas of administration and
production: the WVHA Economic-Administrative Main Office as well as
the bureaucratic empire of the SS (Callinicos 2001: 399; Kershaw
1989: 50–54).
Elias trenchantly expounds the Nazis’ ideological stance, especially the
background to the “cumulative spiral of radicalization” that was imple-
mented in 1941, setting in motion the Final Solution (Callinicos 2001:
399–400). Elias is particularly telling in foregrounding one crucial prereq-
uisite to this: the illusory belief that Western civilization would prohibit
 3  VIOLENCE, SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AND THE DECIVILIZING PROCESS…  57

such a course of action. His constructivist uncovering of a fatal essential-

ism inherent in Western 1930s’ ethics should be memorable for us now:

Many Europeans seem to be of the opinion that it is part of their nature to

behave in a civilized manner […] sometimes they even characterize them-
selves as part of the “civilized races” in contrast to “uncivilized races”, as if
civilized behaviour were a genetic attribute of specific human groups and
not of others. (Elias 1996: 308)

How acceptable is Elias’s general civilizing thesis? The Germans adds

vital conditional statements: civilization is identified as a historical process,
perpetually in danger of being sidelined. Moreover, [Western]
“Civilization” is emphatically not to be contrasted with a hypothetical
zero-state, attributable to supposedly uncivilized pre-capitalist societies
(Mennell 1992: 228–34).
Yet haven’t anthropological studies, such as Lévi-Strauss’s structural
analyses of myths, finally put paid to the notion that “we” have civilization
and they do not? Lévi-Strauss’s book on manners (1978) ends with a pow-
erful concluding indictment of “civilized” societies’ impending ecological
catastrophe that makes the civilizing process more ambivalent than even
Elias himself had realized (1978: 507–8).
Lévi-Strauss’s warnings re climate crisis seem even more timely now.
Yet, despite these, we can still speak of modernity as qualitatively different.
For Elias is following the sociological tradition not just of Marx and
Weber, but also of Simmel, Lukács, Adorno, Horkheimer and Mannheim
(cf Krieken 1998: 125). For these thinkers, pre-capitalist societies exert
more physical controls and fewer internalized controls in inculcating disci-
pline. Moreover, pre-capitalist actors possess a different sense of the econ-
omy from the modern ethos in which “business is business” and “time is
money”, as in the “so-called advanced societies” (cf Bourdieu 1977: 195).
For these reasons, Elias was surely right in viewing medieval societies
(fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) as possessing a class of raiding war-
lords less prone to controls over impulsive violent action than the dominant
classes in later Western societies. (Elias 2000: 164)
58  B. FOWLER

Pierre Bourdieu: State Monopolization of Violence

and Symbolic Violence

In 1960, Bourdieu described the Algerian War as bringing about “the end
of a world”—the peasant world—whilst also revealing a “conflict of civili-
zations” (2003: 64, 116). Yet his studies of Kabylia which sought to
reconstruct that traditional social order before the full imposition of the
colonial economy can be seen as divergent in crucial respects from Elias.
Whereas Elias stresses violence and the spontaneous expression of the
drives in pre-capitalist formations, Bourdieu emphasizes the Lévi-­
Straussian (and earlier, Durkheimian) point: that the maturity of social
organization compensates for the absence of major technological advances
(1962: 6). The Kabylians have an extraordinary mastery of social integra-
tion (or civilization), underpinned by subsistence agriculture, part-time
artisanal trades and collective belief in their clan chiefs. Here gentle vio-
lence takes the form of paternalist domination, “misrecognised” in gift
exchange. Thus, on the one hand, in the anthropological longue durée of
pre-colonial Kabylia, the absence of any State monopoly of violence means
that each male peasant is obliged to use force to retain his honour (1977:
61). On the other hand—against Elias’s image of simple societies as devoid
of drive-inhibitions or against the image of the French colonial mission as
the bearer of Saint-Simonian civilization—Bourdieu stresses the Algerians’
orderly arbitration of disputes. Such social “technology” is reinforced by
the doxic teachings of myths and rituals (cf. Elias 1991a).
Despite this additional complexity, Bourdieu’s debts to Elias are ubiq-
uitous, not just in Distinction but in his seminal article, Le Mort Saisit le
Vif (1980). Here he initially invokes Marx’s image of the link between the
living and the dead. Within any given class, the “inheritor” is himself
“inherited”: moulded and transformed by his very heritage (Bourdieu
1980: 7, 1990a: 147–152). Bourdieu then draws on Elias’s The Court
Society to reveal the complex nature of hereditary domination. For as Elias
had shown, not only are absolute monarchs (such as Louis XIV) con-
strained by the rituals of the courtly game they have themselves initiated
but court society itself is a field (1980: 7). In other words, the habitus of
all the court’s agents ensures that they are orchestrated together, even
without a conductor, irreducible to each agent’s subjective wills, or to
material circumstances (1980: 7–8; cf. 1990a: 53).
The most mature exposition of Bourdieu’s understanding of how sym-
bolic violence operates in the post-Enlightenment capitalist order is
 3  VIOLENCE, SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AND THE DECIVILIZING PROCESS…  59

undoubtedly The State Nobility, with its sophisticated reprise of the educa-
tional theories of Reproduction and The Inheritors. The State Nobility can
be read as having a parallel project to that of Marx, aimed at demystifying
the deep structures concealed beneath the surface of the contemporary
social order. In Marx, this proceeds by analysing the underlying value form
of capital. When Marx writes—as we have noted above—that it is labour-­
power that “brings forth living offspring or at least lays golden eggs”
(1976: 255), he is revealing what he calls a hidden, or “occult,” process,
which is not immediately perceptible to the everyday observer. The casual
gaze is blinkered by the legal rhetoric of fair contracts governing exchanges
that leave unseen the inequalities of power between capitalist employer
and workers.
Bourdieu accepts—as do Marx and Weber—that modernity witnesses a
distinctive form of production and hence domination based on reproduc-
tion mediated more by the school than the family’s economic inheritance.
Thus increased technical competence (understood broadly) is a prerequisite
for domination. To some degree, this is a real development of “rational-
ization,” “democratization” and universalism, judgements that are, in
Kantian terms, “valid for everyone” (1996b: 453, footnote 6).
Yet, Bourdieu argues, this competence is still compatible with the trans-
mission of a family “inheritance” of cultural capital and with it, material
advantages. Inheritance here should be understood in a very specific way:
it is a non-genetic inheritance “misrecognised” as a process conferred by
blood or birth (1996b: ch. 2). Thus, the transmission of a cultural stock
through family mechanisms is falsely explained by an essentialism—or
what Bourdieu calls a class racism—in which a biologically innate essence
is held to be productive of nobility of thought, inherent talent, inborn
artistic sense and so on. Bourdieu’s evidence for this takes various forms:
his quantitative assessment of linkages between grades and social origins
(see below), and his qualitative analysis of discourse.
The qualitative basis derives from the autobiographies and obituaries of
graduates from the Ecole Normal Supérieure and the Ecole Nationale
d’Administration (the famous “énarques”): the ENA graduates are often
described, he notes, as “like hereditary princes,” while the competitive
selection for entry is a knightly “dubbing” (1996b: 103). This is the magi-
cal veiling of a socially constructed essence.
Bourdieu’s dissection (1996b: 32) of the forms through which this
“machine for cognitive misunderstanding” functions offers a valuable
extension to Marx’s demystification of political economy. The precise
60  B. FOWLER

pedagogic mechanism is brought to light when the sociologist scrutinizes

empirically the marks and comments given to philosophy essays at the
highest levels of the lycée preparatory classes for the Ecole Normale
Supérieure. In practice, the teachers assess the students’ work in such a
way as to unwittingly conflate their judgement about the students’ social
class with their strictly academic assessments of each essay’s philosophical
merits. Essays tend to be judged “distinguished” or “brilliant” when the
student comes from the haute bourgeoisie, as against “mediocre” or
“pedestrian” for students from the subordinate class. Statistically, a mir-
roring of the social hierarchy occurs within the marking hierarchy; yet
each teacher would be shocked at the suggestion that they had illegiti-
mately imported social criteria into a pure assessment of merit (1996b:
38, 40).
Moreover, Bourdieu contends that alongside this first basis of conceal-
ment, there is a second, twentieth-century concealment: domination by a
State Nobility (especially a cultural elite). This culturally dominant frac-
tion starts out as a segregated student group. It is separated from others
by its distinctive style of life (communal eating and sleeping) and, crucially,
by various “rites of institution” (1996b: 73), such as the agony of the
demanding exams to enter the highest ranking grandes écoles. Indeed, the
type of self-denial encouraged in the intellectual “hothouses” of the select
lycées and grandes écoles resembles not just Durkheim’s earlier descrip-
tion of the Jesuits’ educational rigour but also Elias’s court society
(Durkheim 1977). There would have been a resonance for Bourdieu of
Elias’s descriptions of the competitive assessments of the members of the
court aristocracy, at once united and forced apart by the verdicts of fashion
and their forced dependence. Specifically, Bourdieu’s analysis of academic
discipline illuminates a strategic asceticism that leaves its mark on the
“Elect” of the grandes écoles, forever fearful of their professors’ verdicts.
Bourdieu’s subject is thus the veiled transmission of dominant class
positions, the presence of an “aristocracy of culture” at the heart of
Republican modernity, further legitimated by “State magic” (1996b:
374). As such, this is a form of fateful predestination (1996b: 79,
109–115), analogous to Milton’s assessment of the predestination doc-
trine as God’s “terrible decree.” It sets apart those certified to possess
“knowledge” or “intelligence,” but it leaves even the chosen few with
inner doubts.
This brings me to Bourdieu’s notable analysis of the interwar German
philosophical field, where a powerful element of his theoretical critique is
 3  VIOLENCE, SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AND THE DECIVILIZING PROCESS…  61

the need to avoid sociological short-circuits, or economically reductive

argument (1991, Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 151–5). His study of
the “symbolic revolution” produced by Martin Heidegger is of particular
interest: it is Bourdieu’s closest equivalent to Elias’s The Germans with its
analysis of counter-civilizing spurts. Bourdieu’s contribution is of a more
limited scope. It principally focuses on the transformation of the philo-
sophical field which occurred with the “prophetic” intervention of
Heidegger. Heidegger, of course, established his point of greatest public
prominence as the Rector of Freiburg University, giving his inaugural lec-
ture (27 May 1933) just after the Nazis had triumphed electorally (March
1933). Bourdieu’s short book was written with knowledge of this Rectoral
address, in which Heidegger infamously pledged loyalty to National
Socialism. But it was written before the recent publication (2017) of the
philosopher’s Black Notebooks. These are incontrovertible records of
Heidegger’s exclusion of Jews from the dignity of “Being”—indeed of
their criminalization and desirable annihilation in his eyes—writings which
decisively “overturn the schemas by which Heidegger has been interpreted
up to now” (Di Cesare 2018: vii, see also 171–2).
Bourdieu outlines an internalist reading of the “Heidegger revolution”
in terms of the innovative forms and meanings in his revival of ontology.
Heidegger’s rupture with Ernst Cassirer’s neo-Kantian thought12 is anal-
ysed in terms of the former’s erudite rehabilitation of ancient philosophy
(particularly Aristotle),13 an epoch-making “imposition of form” against
the scholarly tropes of cosmopolitan modernity and Kantian metaphysics
(1991: 1–6, 61). But Bourdieu also rejects a purely internalist explanation
for Heidegger’s success. Instead, he has the wider ambition of showing
how a mystical, anti-Enlightenment irrationalism became dominant in
Germany, as Heidegger sublimated philosophically the ideological
12
 It should be added that Cassirer, who was Jewish, had to subsequently take exile in
New York.
13
 Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle is divergent from current readings of Aristotle as a theo-
rist of community, heir to Marx—see, for example, Meikle (1995). I should add that there
has been a predominantly positive assessment in recent literature of both Heideggerian phi-
losophy and Bourdieu’s perceived regard for his innovation (see, e.g. Atkinson (2016) and
Robbins (2019)). This stems from Bourdieu’s memory of his youthful fascination with
Heidegger’s Being and Time (Bourdieu 1990b: 10). Yet by the time Bourdieu published his
book on Heidegger’s symbolic revolution (1991 [1988]), he had become highly disen-
chanted with the latter’s antisemitism, antagonism to the Welfare State and repudiation of
empirical social science. All these stances are laid bare through Bourdieu’s close reading
(1991, see especially vii–viii).
62  B. FOWLER

discourses of certain best-selling novels, such as those by Ernst Junger,

and also competed successfully with his academic position-taking (1991:
69). Thus Adorno’s materialist or externalist interpretation of Heidegger’s
plebeian class determinants has only a limited validity because it short-­
circuits these struggles within the philosophical field itself. It neglects the
dangerously prophetic (charismatic) stance of Heidegger as a champion of
the Ancients, who offers a dehistoricized ontology as against the estab-
lished academic power of the neo-Kantians (1991: 70–72).
Heidegger’s rise to pre-eminence, for Bourdieu, was important pre-
cisely because it weakened the German universities’ attempts to withstand
Nazi attacks on their independence. In opting for Husserl’s conceptual
approach to temporality against Heidegger’s, Bourdieu’s position-takings
are perceptive (see e.g. 1991; 4–5, 33). But Bourdieu also orders this
brief—yet dazzling—book in terms of a defence of Marx’s economic alien-
ation versus Heidegger’s “ontological alienation” (1991: 68), as well
as  offering further support for Elias’s culture/civilization opposition,
elaborated more closely within the German academic field (1991: 113–4
fn. 37).14
On a higher level of generality, numerous features of Bourdieu’s and
Elias’s conceptions of sociology link them together. Both advance a pro-
foundly anti-substantialist approach. Following Marx, Bourdieu empha-
sizes, as we have seen, that the “real is the relational” (1987: 3) whilst
Elias stresses the historical structuring of action within “figurations”: net-
works or chains. Both are critical of the orthodox binary divisions of
Western thought (individual/society; body/mind, structure and agency).
Both develop a notion of habitus, against the concept of the subject con-
ceived by methodological individualism: that of a self-contained “homo
clausus” (Elias 2000: 472; Bourdieu 1990a: 52–62). Both rework the
concepts of class and Weberian Stände (status) (e.g. Elias 2000; Bourdieu
1984: xii), stressing shifting power relations and the dialectics of qualifica-
tion and devaluation (1984: 143–4, 163). Both, at their best, break with

14
 The influence of Elias on Bourdieu is further evident in their respective sociologies of the
body and sport. Crucially, for example, given Elias’s civilizing theme, both he and Bourdieu
depict the sociogenesis of the modern game of football as one that moved from the bloody
struggles of parish teams in folk football to the contemporary, exciting, internationally regu-
lated “beautiful game” (Elias, 1971, Elias and Dunning, 1971, Bourdieu 1978, 1993b:
120). Bourdieu, in particular, notes the rise, historically, of an amateur ethos of sport, a
“physical art for art’s sake,” attracting particularly those with sufficient economic means and
leisure (Bourdieu, 1978: 823).
 3  VIOLENCE, SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AND THE DECIVILIZING PROCESS…  63

reified conceptions of classes as “things” by introducing a richer, cultural-

ist dynamic, similar to that of E.P. Thompson.15
Did they occasionally concede too much to hegemonic stratification
theory, straying too far from Marx? Sadly, Elias’s very late work (1991a, b)
seems to me to lose that deep understanding of the affinities between
material interests and cultural movements that distinguishes his greatest
work. With Bourdieu (1987, 2019), matters stand differently. He vividly
explores the positions that people share with some others in social space,
in terms of the actual number and volume of their capitals. He rejects, as
mechanical materialism, the view that shared space, bounded by these
objectively founded classes, entails identical practices. This is to err by
making realities out of abstractions, things out of logic (1987: 7; 1990a:
136). For classes to play out their differences in the historical arena as
corporate bodies, they must, first, acquire spokespersons and, second,
compete successfully with rival world-views—specifically, combating com-
peting visions and divisions of the world in terms of national or gender
struggles (1987: 11, 2019). This valuably reaffirms—as E.P. Thompson
emphasized earlier—the need for the active work of creating classes, despite
the fact that classes are at their most solidaristic when their actors share
objective similarities of position (1990a: 136). These had been early con-
cerns for Bourdieu, from Algeria onwards (2008a: 75–99, 120–121). In
his last empirical project, The Weight of the World, he explores again these
competing group formations: especially fantasized constructions of
national communities, and weak solidarities formed around whiteness or
other forms of racialization (see e.g. Bourdieu et  al. 1999: 187–8,
536–548).

Bourdieu’s “On the State”

A rich source for new views of Bourdieu has been the posthumous publi-
cation, On the State, which could be seen as a prolonged riff on Elias.
Focusing especially on The Civilizing Process and The Court Society but
with numerous references to Marx and Marxists, Bourdieu draws atten-
tion to Elias’s “great originality.” But Elias, he argues, lacks an adequate
political dimension in his analysis of the absolutist unification of the
nation-state. Thus, he agrees with Elias (2000) that the kings’ monopoly
of taxation permitted their monopoly of the standing army and thus of the

15
 Here I accept an argument first formulated incisively by Steven Loyal (2004: 135)
64  B. FOWLER

means of violence. Although Elias sees the state as a legitimate “racket,”

“Elias, in fact, lets the symbolic dimension of state power disappear”
(2014: 128). Fundamental for symbolic legitimacy is the emergence of
royal lawyers—the noblesse de robe—and their codification of State rules,
and, subsequently, a public bureaucracy forged by such lawyers (in France,
as early as 1700). It is this continuity of administration that he sees as tell-
ing in the State’s representation of the supreme form of social solidarity
(or “meta-capital”). For lawyers, the State is the geometric point of all
perspectives—rather as Leibniz had attributed this geometric point to the
divine. Consequently, under the protocols of lawyers, the State comes to
embody the universal: “[t]he State effects a unification of codes” (2014:
142, see also Bourdieu 1989). It took a “cultural revolution” to create the
State (ibid.). But once created, it possesses extraordinary functions in
terms of hegemony that have been best expressed by Gramsci. We should
not reject Marx, he emphasizes, but should add to Marxism another
dimension:

to understand that the state is not just what Marx said about it, it is also
something that succeeds in gaining recognition, to which very many things
are granted, obedience among others […] The State accordingly is the
instance of legitimation par excellence which consecrates, solemnizes, rati-
fies, records. (2014: 145)

The State “consecrates” a national culture—particularly when it is a

nation-state rather than a stateless nation, like Scotland. Consequently, the
State is central for an expanded materialism possessing a theory of sym-
bolic capital: that which governs the recognition of a group, its sense of
being “justified” in its existence. Such a theory of the State, with its
Weberian-Durkheimian heritage, has certain key omissions when it comes
to the role of relations of production (Loyal 2017: 140–141; Fowler
2020: 448–50). But, as Loyal has argued, it is highly illuminating when
used to understand struggles over the classification of groups, such as
migrants or asylum-seekers and their life-chances, including access to State
facilities and student loans (Loyal 2017: 142).
Yet more akin to Marx than Durkheim, Bourdieu does recognize that
“all these state games serve some people more than others and serve the
dominants more than the dominated” (2014: 113). Tellingly, against
Elias’s view of the disciplinary State, he reminds us of the “philanthropy of
the State” (the “welfare state”), especially in France, from the mid-1940s
 3  VIOLENCE, SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AND THE DECIVILIZING PROCESS…  65

to the late 1970s. For the State as a mechanism for “domesticating the
dominated” is unparalleled, as Weber and Gramsci had both recognized
(2014: 142). In particular, where capitalism had, through the nineteenth
century progressively disembedded economic relations from social soli-
darities, it was in the interests of the dominants that certain public benefits
be provided by the State—to keep “the people” “in the game.” This, in
Bourdieu’s view, is why the Welfare State (l’État Provident) was invented—
it includes the People (minimally), yet it also controls them (2014: 358–60,
368–70).
But within the United States, and especially in areas such as the Chicago
ghetto, he notes also the emergence of a popular “state within a state”
(2014: 359) (e.g. African American churches), alongside the reduction of
public institutions linked organically to the Welfare State, such as hospitals
and clinics (cf. Bourdieu et al. 1999: 181–8). This signals the “retraction
of the state” which—in his view—ultimately weakens not just the State as
such but even the dominants, who are left without the ramparts and moats
protecting their property and privilege (2014: 360–1).
Bourdieu’s theoretical perspective along with Elias’s analyses of decivi-
lizing periods together has been taken up very memorably by Loic
Wacquant. This allows us to characterize the contemporary realities of the
African American and Latino “hypergettoes” in deindustrialized cities
such as Chicago, particularly with the post-1970s’ rolling back of public
welfare.
The consequence? Wacquant (2004) cites as many as 96 murders per
100,000 inhabitants being perpetrated in the Wentworth district of
Chicago’s South side. A murder takes place every 10 hours in this setting.
In 1984, in the United States, there were 400 arrests for violent crime per
100,000; by 1992, these had increased four-fold (Wacquant 2004:
98). Indeed:

young black men from Harlem, for instance, have a higher chance of dying
from violence than did soldiers sent to the frontlines at the height of the
Vietnam War—and the crushing poverty that pervades this urban enclave
shorn of economic activities from which the government has virtually with-
drawn, save for its repressive arm [increases this precarity]. (Wacquant, in
Bourdieu et al. 1999: 146)

Such violent deaths are often at the hands of the police themselves, as
James Baldwin delineated in the 1960s. Indeed, from 2014 to 2019,
66  B. FOWLER

police officers in the United States killed over a thousand people a year,
predominantly young African Americans (Wikipedia 2021).16

Conclusion
Bourdieu’s sociology of culture (1993a, 1996a) brilliantly interprets a
field of practice that has too often been dominated by an undersocialized
conception of artistic actors.17 Distinction, Reproduction and The State
Nobility produced an important renaissance of class theory. In his late
work, Bourdieu uses his array of distinctive concepts to theorize—amongst
other subjects—the rising spirals of violence in the migrant and second-­
generation banlieues. He links these popular protests, on the one hand, to
the arbitrariness of State controls over violence and, on the other hand, to
the reduction of the Welfare State and the resort to temporary work con-
tracts 18 (Bourdieu et  al. 1999: Section 4, 255–419; Bourdieu 2005,
2014: 359).
Elias’s three major works, The Civilizing Process, The Court Society and
The Germans, illuminate the mechanics of the State monopolization of
violence which created the absolutist court societies, their bourgeois
descendants, and the “decivilizing” counter-movement of Nazism. In
these he explored various sources of the “civilized” self, showing how
drive-inhibition was closely linked to the struggles over hierarchical posi-
tion. Elias contributed much to Bourdieu, as we can now see even more
vividly from Bourdieu’s lectures on the state (2014).19 Elias and Bourdieu
together have added to our inheritance from Marx. They reveal the
nuanced interplay of violence and symbolic violence so essential for grasping
the changing figurations of the modern capitalist world order.

16
 A Black Lives Matter report (2021) states that, in the first eight months of 2020, police
in the United States killed 164 black people. But this may be an underestimate: the
Washington Post and The Guardian statistics for 2019 stated that over 1000 had been
killed by police, disproportionately African Americans (Wikipedia 2021).
17
 An earlier exception to this is Howard Becker’s Art Worlds (1986).
18
 He also offers evidence that second-generation migrants still partly “misrecognize” their
situation (Bourdieu 1996b: 30–41) yet are also becoming disenchanted with their parents’
meritocratic illusions. They demand that schools in their areas should have better-educated
teachers and improved facilities (Bourdieu in Bourdieu et al. 1999: 422–3).
19
 Bourdieu’s sociology is not, to my knowledge, referred to in Elias’s texts: Elias, on the
other hand, is frequently invoked in Bourdieu’s works.
 3  VIOLENCE, SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AND THE DECIVILIZING PROCESS…  67

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 CHAPTER 4

Putting Marx in the Dock: Practice of Logic

and Logic of the Practice

Gabriella Paolucci

Embodied Domination and the Discursive Order

A constant theme throughout Bourdieu’s work is a polemical engagement
with the intellectualism and mentalism1 of scholastic reason. He argues
that the way of philosophising which these latter deploy does not provide
the necessary means for getting to grips with man’s social being, in all its
grandeur and its poverty. Hence the need to embark upon constructing
what the subtitle of the first edition of his Pascalian Meditations (Bourdieu
2000) calls a new, “negative” philosophy,2 namely, one which does not

1
 “The ‘mentalist’ vision, which is inseparable from belief in the dualism of mind and body,
spirit and matter, originates from an almost anatomical and therefore typically scholastic
viewpoint on the body from outside. […] Intellectualism, the scholastic spectator’s theory of
knowledge, is thus led to ask of the body, or about the body, problems of knowledge”
(Bourdieu 2000: 133).
2
 The subtitle of the 1997 first edition speaks of Éléments pour une philosophie negative. We
could be inclined to see it also as a reference to Adorno’s negative philosophy.

G. Paolucci (*)
Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Florence, Firenze, Italy
e-mail: gabriella.paolucci@unifi.it

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 71

Switzerland AG 2022
G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and
Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_4
72  G. PAOLUCCI

separate itself from worldly things, and which is aware of the conditions of
possibility of its own operation. Some of the most significant themes of
Bourdieusian epistemology derive from this systematic critique of the posi-
tion from which intellectuals speak. These include his tension towards tran-
scending the dichotomous vision of subject and object; the imperative of
epistemic reflexivity; and the need for a praxeological-type knowledge that
goes beyond the—opposed but complementary—limits of phenomenol-
ogy and structuralism and finally gains access to knowledge of the mode of
generation of practices. These are all pre-conditions for a science of the
relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, or, more precisely, of the
dialectic between the “internalisation of externality” and the “externalisa-
tion of internality”—and this is the definition Bourdieu gives of habitus,
the figure par excellence of the codification of domination. The battle
against intellectualism takes the form of a vigorous assertion of bodily reason:

We learn bodily. The social order inscribes itself in bodies through this per-
manent confrontation, which may be more or less dramatic but is always
largely marked by affectivity and, more precisely, by affective transactions
with the environment. But it would be wrong to underestimate the pressure
or oppression, continuous and often unnoticed, of the ordinary order of
things, the conditionings imposed by the material conditions of existence,
by the insidious injunctions and ‘inert violence’ (as Sartre puts it) of eco-
nomic and social structures and of the mechanisms through which they arc
reproduced. The most serious social injunctions are addressed not to the
intellect but to the body, treated as a “memory pad”. (Bourdieu 2000: 141)

Practical knowledge is a knowledge of the body and through the body,

which allows for action in the social world, without this being the result of
consciously learned rules or rational calculations. Incidentally, this is also
where the link with Pascal—to whom Bourdieu dedicates his Meditations—
appears in its fullest significance. In both of their thinking, social order has
no foundation other than habit, firmly anchored in the body. However, if
for Pascal order is to be carefully safeguarded, for Bourdieu it is an impos-
ture that ought to be unmasked and, if possible, subverted. It is in this
perspective that we should read the central importance that the question
of domination takes on in Bourdieu’s sociology—that is, the science of the
persistence of forms of subjection and their reproduction.3

3
 In this regard, some have sought—not without foundation—to identify a significant simi-
larity with the classical phase of Frankfurt School critical philosophy. See, among others,
Bauer et al. (2014).
 4  PUTTING MARX IN THE DOCK: PRACTICE OF LOGIC AND LOGIC…  73

So, if Bourdieu mainly concerns himself with the persistence of domi-

nation and its way of embedding itself in bodies, this does not mean that
he avoids venturing onto the territories of emancipation. Indeed, he does
so in at least two circumstances: when, touching on the theme of the rela-
tionship between political and cognitive subversion, he attributes an indis-
putable primacy to the latter; and when he entrusts sociological reason
with a primary role in the process of liberation from domination. Yet, in
both cases, we find ourselves faced with a model that consigns Bourdieusian
sociology to an aporetic outcome. For at the heart of a theoretical con-
struct that is programmatically opposed to any intellectualist perspective,
and which hinges on the idea that domination does not rely on the discur-
sive order but rather takes bodily form, Bourdieu ends up entrusting lib-
eration to the heretical discourse of the prophet and the liberating word of
the sociologist. With an unexpected switch of perspective, the spirit thus
ends up “triumphing over the body and its implacable logic,” as Macherey
notes (2014: 70). This is a significant incongruency, for it affects the whole
of Bourdieusian domination theory, which thus risks running aground
precisely where we would have expected the greatest advantages from a
stance which purports to be anti-mentalist and materialist. And it is pre-
cisely with regard to the question of liberation from domination that,
against all expectation, Bourdieu puts the materialist Marx in the dock,
accusing him of adopting an intellectualist perspective. Reconstructing
this polemic will allow us, in the arguments that follow, to highlight the
basic underpinnings of Bourdieu’s thought and the salient points of a dis-
pute that still has great theoretical and political relevance today.

Domination Takes Bodily Form

Bourdieu challenges intellectualism by centring on an ontology of social
relations that presupposes a radical break with the substantialism typical of
philosophies of the subject. With habitus—which is the real key to the
relational way of thinking about social objectivity—Bourdieu critically
addresses both the objectivism of the notion of the “individual” and the
transcendental posture of the “subject.” The Bourdieusian “function of
the habitus […] restores to the agent a generating, unifying, constructing,
classifying power, while recalling that this capacity to construct social real-
ity, itself socially constructed, is not that of a transcendental subject but of
a socialized body, investing in its practice socially constructed organizing
principles that are acquired in the course of a situated and dated social
74  G. PAOLUCCI

experience” (Bourdieu 2000: 136–7). In this, the idea of a human essence

is overturned into its opposite, finding its resolution in relations. But this
is not sufficient to defining Bourdieu’s stance: for the centrality of rela-
tions finds explicit manifestation only in practice, and it is everyday prac-
tices that bring this relational dimension to light. This vision is highly
reminiscent of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach (Marx 1976), to which Bourdieu
frequently refers in positive terms,4 though he then fails to recognise its
radicality when the focus is no longer on subjugation itself, but rather on
the conditions of possibility for overcoming it. But we will return to this
point later on.
Social relations are not simply learned, perceived or understood through
thought. Rather, they are deposited in the bodies of individuals; they are
somatised. Knowledge of the world is practical knowledge, as opposed to
conscious, intellectual comprehension. In Bourdieu’s vision, this is made
possible by two concomitant phenomena: that is, the fact that cognitive
structures are produced by the incorporation of the objective social struc-
tures in which the agent is immersed and that the instruments of cognition
for grasping the world are constructed by and through this world. The
socialised body is the real agent of practical knowledge of the world. It is,
therefore, both object and subject of the constitution of the dispositions
of habitus, which, “as the indelible inscriptions of tattooing” (2000: 141),
penetrate the subject, giving it a form. The habitus is a state of the body; it
is “history incarnated in bodies.” The practices it induces—or prevents—
are the outcome of social structures’ slow process of penetration into the
living flesh of subjects. The Bourdieusian ego is thus the fruit of the con-
tinuous osmosis between the body and the social world: “The body is in
the social world but the social world is in the body, in a relationship of
belonging and possession in which the body possessed by history immedi-
ately appropriates the things inhabited by the same history” (ibid.: 152).
Corporeality is a constant theme in Bourdieu, even if it takes on differ-
ent accents and emphases in the various phases of his thought. Already

4
 For instance, in Pascalian Meditations: “One has to construct a materialist theory which
(in accordance with the wish that Marx expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach) is capable of
taking back from idealism the ‘active side’ of practical knowledge that the materialist tradi-
tion has abandoned to it. This is precisely the function of the notion of habitus which restores
to the agent a generating, unifying, constructing, classifying power” (Bourdieu 2000: 136).
References to these Theses of Marx’s are scattered across many of Bourdieu’s writings: see, for
instance, Bourdieu (1977: vi; 1992: 52). On this question, see Macherey (2008) and
Denunzio (2013).
 4  PUTTING MARX IN THE DOCK: PRACTICE OF LOGIC AND LOGIC…  75

present in his youthful engagement with Leibniz, Heidegger and Merleau-­

Ponty, it found its real systematisation in his mature works—Masculine
Domination (2001) and Pascalian Meditations (2000)—in which
Bourdieu focuses on corporeality as the cipher of the relationship with the
world, and subjectivity as a certain way of being in the world of the body.
And it is here that he launches his sharpest attacks on the mind/body
dualism and on the intellectualism of those who, as spectators remote
from the social world and indifferent to bodies and their practices, remain
trapped in a scholastic vision:

The relation to the world is a relation of presence in the world, of being in

the world, in the sense of belonging to the world, possessed by it, in which
neither the agent nor the object is posited as such. The degree to which the
body is invested in this relation is no doubt one of the main determinants of
the interest and attention that arc involved in it and of the importance—
measurable by their duration, intensity, etc. of the bodily modifications that
result from it. This is what is forgotten by the intellectualist vision, a vision
directly linked to the fact that scholastic universes treat the body and every-­
connected with it, in particular the urgency of the satisfaction of needs and
physical violence, actual or potential, in such a way that the body is in a sense
excluded from the game. (Bourdieu 2000: 141)

One can detect in these words echoes of Merleau-Ponty’s perspective,5

which sets the phenomenological experience of the corps propre at the cen-
tre of an anthropology that seeks to emancipate itself from dualism. Yet,
unlike in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, in Bourdieu the structuring of
practice is not the result of the transcendental activity of a moi or a pure
consciousness, but rather the experience of a structured and structuring
socialised body. For the sociologist, this means attributing the inhabited
and forgotten body—experienced from within as an opening, impulse,
tension or desire—the dimension of a product of the social determination
of existence, an essential correlate of its engagement in a structured space
of social positions and meanings. Consequently, social determination
often does not intervene as an external training of the body, as an imposi-
tion of norms from the outside. The habitus qualifies the impulse, the

5
 As highlighted by Iordanis Marcoulatos: “They both see embodied significance—in the
form of the multifaceted actuality of the lived body—as the mediating ground between these
theoretical divisions; the experience of the lived body is the de facto dissolution of the sub-
ject/object dichotomy which is the key target in the work of both thinkers” (Marcoulatos
2001:1).
76  G. PAOLUCCI

tension or the desire of the inhabited body, since there is no natural sub-
ject pre-existing its socialisation, nor a pre-constituted biological nature
that orients an openness to the world that precedes social structuring. The
relationship to the properties of the self, which passes through bodily
experience, has no meaning except as a relation to a socialised self.
Although in Bourdieu we can detect a form of naturalism, which takes
into account the fact that some universal characteristics of bodies do exist,
these aspects do not imply any given response: the practices of the subject
are always mediated by the incorporation of specific social dispositions.
The structuralist idea that the relative indeterminacy of natural experi-
ences constitutes the basis on which social determinations are fixed is very
explicit in Pascalian Meditations:

To speak of dispositions is simply to take note of a natural predisposition of

human bodies, the only one, according to Hume—as read by Deleuze—that
a rigorous anthropology is entitled to assume, a conditionability in the sense
of a natural capacity to acquire non-natural, arbitrary capacities. To deny
existence of acquired dispositions, in the case of living beings, is to deny the
existence of learning in the sense of a selective, durable transformation of
the body through the reinforcement or weakening of synaptic connections.
(Bourdieu 2000: 136)

The condition of the biological body imposes the areas of intervention

in which the work of social structuring is to take place. And nothing else.
The naturalist attitude is thus always an illusion (and often an imposture,
when it naturalises the results of socialisation), for the social world has
always already carried out its work of symbolic transposition, as in the
cases of masculine domination or class domination. Embodied determina-
tions are historically constituted dispositions, organised into a coherent
and socially shared ensemble. The natural experience of the body is under-
determined, whereas the original experience is that of the relationship of
habit to a social world in which the bodily dialectic of the habitus never
ceases its double movement of internalising exteriority and externalising
interiority.
Such a construction is fully realised in the conception of the body as the
depository of relations of domination, outside of which no constitution of
the subject is thinkable. To the conception of a sovereign will that imposes
itself on the individual from the outside, with law and prohibition, placed
in the order of discourse, Bourdieu contrasts the vision of an immanent
domination that acts on the “always-already-subject.” This latter has never
 4  PUTTING MARX IN THE DOCK: PRACTICE OF LOGIC AND LOGIC…  77

experienced a “first nature” but is thrown into the symbolic (and material)
order of a “second nature” that installs itself in bodies. Subjectification
and subjugation are mutually constituted by means of the body.6 Bourdieu
does emphasise the productive aspects—à la Foucault, we could say—of
symbolic domination: the dominated form of the subject’s body is not so
much the result of repressive or coercive practices, but the product of dis-
positions that are kneaded into the body in a long and slow positive train-
ing process (Sabot 2013).
The body is the site on which all the potential of domination is
offloaded—from the injunctions of the order of things to cognitive struc-
tures, largely produced by the State (Paolucci 2014) and embodied in the
brain.7 Consistent with his anti-intellectualist stance, Bourdieu repeatedly
emphasises how the effect of domination finds its conditions of possibility
not in the logic of discourse—in “consent to reasons”—but in the practi-
cal sense inscribed in the body: “The most serious social injunctions are
addressed not to the intellect but to the body, treated as a ‘memory pad’”
(2000: 141). Domination inscribes itself in the depths of the dispositions
of the habitus, producing a bodily hexis that conforms to the social order.
Adherence to this order is not based on conscious obedience to laws or
imperative forms of power, but on practical dispositions to act in confor-
mity with the reproduction of society as it is.
Habitus and doxa intervene to give effectiveness to the most insidious
form of coercion, namely, symbolic violence8—a concept with which
Bourdieu links the phenomena of domination in the symbolic sphere and

6
 On this aspect, little addressed by the critical literature on Bourdieu, I take the liberty of
referring the reader to my own, Paolucci (2017).
7
 Bourdieu dedicated his lectures at the Collège de France from 1989 to 1992 to an analy-
sis of the state (Bourdieu 2014).
8
 One of the most exhaustive definitions of the concept of “symbolic violence” appears in
Pascalian Meditations: “Symbolic violence is the coercion which is set up only through the
consent that the dominated cannot fail to give to the dominator (and therefore to the domi-
nation) when their understanding of the situation and relation can only use instruments of
knowledge that they have in common with the dominator, which, being merely the incorpo-
rated form of the structure of the relation of domination, make this relation appear as natu-
ral; or, in other words, when the schemes they implement in order to perceive and evaluate
themselves or to perceive and evaluate the dominators (high/low, male/female, white/
black, etc.) are the product of the incorporation of the (thus naturalized) classifications
which their social being is the product” (Bourdieu 2000: 170). For an analysis of this
notion—one of Bourdieu’s most original and striking—I take the liberty of referring the
reader to my own, Paolucci (2010). See also: Addi (2001); Bauer et  al. [eds.] (2014);
Mauger (2005); Terray (2002); Weininger (2002).
78  G. PAOLUCCI

in bodies. Whether we are talking about class relations, gender relations or

the encounter between educators and pupils, an identical mechanism is at
work. The belief in the legitimacy of domination and misrecognition as
“recognition of an order which is also established in the mind” (Bourdieu
1984: 182) combine to render opaque the knowledge which is available to
the subjects to objectify their position in the social space and thus access
the truth of domination. Neither the conditions of possibility of subjuga-
tion, nor the mechanisms it deploys, are fully accessible to the
consciousness:

The effect of symbolic domination (sexual, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, etc.)

is exerted not in the pure logic of knowing consciousnesses but in the
obscurity of the dispositions of habitus, in which are embedded the schemes
of perception and appreciation which, below the level of the decisions of the
conscious mind and the controls of will, are the basis of a relationship of
practical knowledge and recognition that is profoundly obscure to itself.
(Bourdieu 2000: 170–71)

The bodily knowledge that makes possible the practical understanding

necessary to act in the world is quite different from the intentional acts of
conscious decoding that are indispensable for a conscious appropriation of
one’s own practice and of the world. While domination is embodied with-
out any need to interpellate the order of discourse, the subjugated body
sanctions its own subjugation with the unconscious abdication of any con-
cern to question the order of things.

Naming the Unnameable: Heretical Discourse

If the embodiment of domination and the difficulty of accessing its cogni-
tive objectification are the salient aspects of subjugation, what are the con-
ditions of possibility for emancipation? If there is an ontological complicity
between social and cognitive structures, what allows for what Bourdieu in
Social Space and the Genesis of ‘Classes’, calls “the breaking out of the circle
of symbolic reproduction” (Bourdieu 1991c: 245)? Bourdieu does not
shy from attempting to resolve this dilemma. He poses the question
repeatedly, drawing on schemas honed in different contexts, from the
examination of the dynamics that regulate the religious field to reflection
on the constitutive power of language, and from the exploration of the
figures of representation in the political field to the definition of sociolo-
gy’s own mission.
 4  PUTTING MARX IN THE DOCK: PRACTICE OF LOGIC AND LOGIC…  79

The theoretical schema that he develops in a first phase fundamentally

proceeds from the conception of the performativity of linguistic acts: the
linguistic act bears the capacity to realise what it enunciates, by the mere
fact of authoritatively enunciating it.9 Hence the conviction that only the
structuring of a “heretical” discourse—that is, one that never exactly coin-
cides with the injunctions of the given symbolic order—can introduce an
interruption in the chain of symbolic and social reproduction. The subject
of such a discourse is the “prophet,” radically distinct from the ordinary
social agent.
Language constitutes a powerful tool for constructing reality. As such,
it contributes to the creation of the social world, the transformation of
which necessarily depends on a change in social actors’ representation of
this world. Overcoming the ontological complicity between mental struc-
tures and the structures of social space—a complicity which provides the
basis for the exercise of domination—is thus only possible by engaging a
struggle that has, as one of its stakes, the transformation of representa-
tions, which are indelibly embedded in bodies and indissolubly linked to
the cognitive structures inscribed in the habitus. Here we find the theme
of the asymmetry between cognitive subversion and political subversion,
addressed in Bourdieu’s extraordinary essay on the religious field (1991a).
In different ways and with different emphases, this theme would again
recur on several occasions through Bourdieu’s writings. Already in this
originally 1971 text, the theoretical framework orienting his approach to
the problem is solidly established:

The relation that obtains between political revolution and symbolic revolu-
tion is not symmetrical. If there is doubtless no symbolic revolution that
does not presuppose a political revolution, political revolution does not in
itself suffice to produce the symbolic revolution necessary to give it an ade-
quate language, a condition of a complete accomplishment. … So long as
the crisis has not found its prophet, the schemes with which one thinks the
world overturned are still the product of the world to be overturned. The
prophet is the one who can contribute to realising the coincidence of the
revolution with itself by operating the symbolic revolution that is called
political revolution. (Bourdieu 1991a: 37)

9
 Here the reference to John Austin is explicit. In fact, the English linguist is a constant
presence in Bourdieu’s work, though the sociologist also notes that one of Austin’s limits is
his failure to consider the social conditions in which performative utterances take place. See
Austin (1962).
80  G. PAOLUCCI

The conviction that “political revolution finds its fulfilment only in the
symbolic revolution that makes it exist fully, in giving it the means to think
itself in its truth, that is, as unprecedented, unthinkable, and unnameable
according to all the previous grids of classification or interpretation”
(ibid.), is developed and deepened further in other essays collected in
Language and Symbolic Power (1991d). In these writings, Bourdieu
focuses on the dynamics of the political field, the site par excellence for the
manifestation of the constitutive power of language, providing tools to
form and transform worldviews. In other words, the political field is one
of the spheres in which the performativity of language is most effective—
“words make things, because they make the consensus on the existence
and the meaning of things” (1998: 67)—and where the symbolic charac-
ter of power becomes apparent in its full breadth. In his essay Description
and Prescription: The Conditions of Possibility and the Limits of Political
Effectiveness (1991b), the idea that the symbolic enjoys ontological prior-
ity over the political finds a complete systematisation. The social and eco-
nomic world in which agents are immersed, and which is the object of
their cognitive apprehension, exerts an action that takes the form of a
“knowledge effect.” From this Bourdieu derives the conviction that the
level of representation assumes a central role in initiating the process that
leads to political subversion and that the discursive dimension is ultimately
the decisive terrain of intervention:

Heretical discourse must not only help to sever the adherence to the world
of common sense by publicly proclaiming a break with the ordinary order,
it must also produce a new common sense and integrate within it the previ-
ously tacit or repressed practices and experiences of an entire group, invest-
ing them with the legitimacy conferred by public expression and collective
recognition. (Bourdieu 1991b: 129)

And again:

Politics begins, strictly speaking, with the denunciation of this tacit contract
of adherence to the established order which defines the original doxa; in
other words, political subversion presupposes cognitive subversion, a con-
version of the vision of the world. […] Heretical subversion exploits the
possibility of changing the social world by changing the representation of
this world. (ivi: 128)
 4  PUTTING MARX IN THE DOCK: PRACTICE OF LOGIC AND LOGIC…  81

Since the political struggle is inseparably a struggle for the power to

preserve or transform a vision of the social world, the stakes par excellence
of the political field are the categories that make this vision possible, as
Bourdieu argues in Social Space and the Genesis of ‘Classes’ (1991c). True
to his materialist leanings, he recalls that if

the objective structures of the social world tend to reproduce themselves in

visions of the social world which contribute to the permanence of those rela-
tions, it is because the structuring principles of the world view are rooted in
the objective structures of the social world and because relations of power
are also present in people’s minds in the form of the categories of perception
of those relations […], the political struggle, [is] a struggle which is insepa-
rably theoretical and practical”. (1991c: 235–6)

However, the transformation of the social world remains entirely bound

to the transformation of the categories of perception of this same world—
the only condition of possibility which would allow the dominated to con-
stitute themselves as autonomous identities, mobilise themselves and
mobilise their own strength. The levels of representation and of the dis-
cursive order thus prove to be the terrains par excellence on which a strug-
gle plays out whose crucial stakes—Bourdieu does not forget—are the
material structures that motivate and found the symbolic domain.

The Heresiarch Sociologist

Even in those of his works in which, as we have seen, the somatisation of
domination takes on crucial importance, the Bourdieusian gesture remains
anchored to a similar theoretical schema. The priority given to the discur-
sive dimension as a condition of possibility for emancipation appears even
more problematic here. But let us follow Bourdieu’s line of reasoning as
he elaborated it in the two works in which this question is addressed:
Masculine Domination and Pascalian Meditations.
Since the symbolic force of performative discourse is a form of power
exercised over bodies, it is then necessary to conduct a sharp critique of
those intellectualist approaches which, rather than conceive cognitive
structures as bodily dispositions—as practical schemas—instead interpret
them as forms of consciousness. Ignoring the extraordinary inertia that
results from the inscription of social structures in bodies, the scholastic
illusion fails to understand that the submission produced by symbolic
violence
82  G. PAOLUCCI

is not an act of consciousness aiming at a mental correlate, a simple mental

representation (the ideas that one ‘forms’) capable of being combated by
the sheer ‘intrinsic force’ of true ideas, or even what is ordinarily put under
the heading of ‘ideology’, but a tacit and practical belief made possible by
the habituation which arises from the training of the body. […] It is quite
illusory to think that symbolic violence can be overcome solely with the
weapons of consciousness and will. [...] Hence also the ‘foolishness’ of all
religious, ethical or political stances consisting in expecting a genuine trans-
formation of relations of domination (or of the dispositions which are, partly
at least, a pro duct of them) from a simple ‘conversion of minds’ (of the
dominant or the dominated), produced by rational preaching and educa-
tion, or, as mâitres à penser sometimes like to think, from a vast collective
logotherapy which it falls to the intellectuals to organise. (Bourdieu
2000: 172; 180)

Here we find the central topics of Bourdieu’s critique of intellectualism.

These are themes that we know well, but which seem to be eclipsed when
it comes to addressing the question of liberation from domination. Here,
Bourdieu seems to change register. He argues that if sociology does not
want to be the handmaiden of domination—as sought by those apologists
of the existing order who “place their rational instruments of knowledge
at the service of ever more rationalized domination” (ibid.: 83–84)—then
it cannot limit itself to photographing the social world. Rather, it must
turn its instruments to unmasking appearances and unveiling the dispositifs
of power. And if “unveiling” means using the arms of critique, then socio-
logical work constitutes a formidable contribution to liberation from
domination. Social science is thus configured as a kind of “symbolic
counter-­violence” (Pinto 2014: 206): in other words, a science that has an
unveiling effect, simply because it brings into question the appearances
under which the exercise of domination is hidden. Sweeping away the
incrustations of doxa, deconstructing common sense and unmasking the
relations of domination that symbolic violence establishes—these are tasks
that sociology can take on insofar as the researcher, unlike ordinary social
agents, has the necessary tools of expression and critique.
Just as Marx called for philosophy “to be made a reality” (Marx
1975c), Bourdieu attributes sociological knowledge a crucial function in
the subversion of the established order. Here, however, the link between
Marx and Bourdieu is broken. For if for Marx the “making-reality” of
philosophy is entrusted to praxis, Bourdieu remains anchored to the
order of discourse: the heretical word constitutes the privileged, if not
 4  PUTTING MARX IN THE DOCK: PRACTICE OF LOGIC AND LOGIC…  83

sole, instrument of action directed at transforming the present state of

things. The unveiling carried out by social science exercises a function
that appears in some ways to replace the practices of the dominated social
agents themselves: a “professional practitioner of the work of making
explicit,” the sociologist, a modern heresiarch, operates that “transfer of
which enables the dominated to achieve a collective mobilisation and
subversive action against the established order” (2000: 188). Thus, at the
heart of a theory that binds social agents to the efficacy of a somatised
domination that undermines the possibility “to formulate and name […]
the unformulated or unnameable” (Bourdieu 1991a: 34), and hinders
access to discursive knowledge, the task of producing the mobilisation of
the victims is entrusted to discourse—which in this case becomes “scien-
tific” (Nordmann 2006).
Yet the reader will find that such a presentation of the sociologist’s mis-
sion leaves many blind spots. If “cognitive structures are not forms of
consciousness, but dispositions of the body, practical schemes” (Bourdieu
2000: 176), and if submission to domination is realised in the body, and
“is not an act of consciousness aiming at a mental correlate, a simple men-
tal representation (the ideas that one ‘forms’) capable of being combated
by the sheer ‘intrinsic force’ of true ideas” (ibid.: 172), then what strange
alchemy allows the sociologist to have a liberating influence through the
“truth-effect” of unveiling alone? Moreover, where would be the differ-
ence between the enlightenment brought by the sociologist and “the
weapons of consciousness and will” (ibid.: 180)—typical tools of the
“rational preaching” and “logotherapy” of the intellectuals against whom
Bourdieu constantly polemicises? We might wonder, in other words,
whether Bourdieu’s choice to emphasise the liberating word of the soci-
ologist does not itself entail the same distance of which he accuses the
scholastic disposition.10 Whether it is the prophet or the sociologist who
names the unnameable, it seems that Bourdieu does not manage to

10
 Pierre Macherey highlights this blind spot of Bourdieusian theory when he observes:
“Does the sociologist […] not perhaps run the risk of returning to the position of the scho-
lastic spectator, who looks at the world from the other side of the glass, as if he too were in
another world—a world without burdens and constraints in which the pure reflexive con-
sciousness of necessity reigns? […] It is hard to see how sociology, which disposes of the
means to tell the world as it is, can, beyond this observation, contribute to its transformation
and thus have—a point which Bourdieu never desists from—an authentically liberating voca-
tion simply by linking the explanation of the world to its transformation” (Macherey
2014: 63–64).
84  G. PAOLUCCI

conceive of political subversion as the outcome of practices that are not

situated on the linguistic-discursive level or else entrusted to some deus ex
machina.11
The recourse to figures who take on the burden of solving the enigma
of emancipation, and who conflict with the theoretical architecture of
praxeology, is not limited to the heretic and the sociologist. It is not
uncommon for Bourdieu to appeal also to other figures, also character-
ised by a kind of “extraterritoriality” with respect to the actions of the
dominated agents. Such is the case, for instance, of the recourse to
objective historical conditions that might make heretical discourse more
effective, and thus realise the conditions of possibility of mobilisation.
But whether we are dealing with a radical transformation of social condi-
tions, or with “an objective crisis, capable of disrupting the close corre-
spondence between the incorporated structures and the objective
structures which produce them, and of instituting a kind of practical
epochè, a suspension of the initial adherence to the established order”
(Bourdieu 1991b: 128), it always means bringing in something external
to the dominated subjects themselves. Even aside from the circular char-
acter of this kind of argument—without an objectively revolutionary
situation, no praxis has a revolutionary character—we cannot but note
the fragility of a construction that, after having shown with rare rigour
and splendid analytical originality the effect that domination exerts on
the body of the dominated, itself ends up delegating responsibility to
objective historical conditions that operate wholly independently of
agents’ own practices.
Both the belief in the demiurge-function of the heretic and the soci-
ologist, and the appeal to objective historical circumstances, would seem
to shine a particularly powerful light on a certain aspect of the weakness
of Bourdieu’s scheme—namely, that it does not adopt the same praxeo-
logical approach that informs his analysis of domination. As a science
that aims to recompose the separation between subjectivity and objectiv-
ity, the social world and knowledge, Bourdieu’s theory of practice is a
rare and effective contribution to the understanding of social reproduc-
tion and domination. Indeed, it constitutes an inescapable reference
point in the history of twentieth-century critical thought, providing a
rigorous image of the way in which the subject is subjugated through the

11
 For a critical reflection on this aspect of Bourdieu’s thought, see Butler (1997).
 4  PUTTING MARX IN THE DOCK: PRACTICE OF LOGIC AND LOGIC…  85

incorporation of the objective structures of the social world, without

being totally determined by them. Yet, the coherence of such a theoreti-
cal model seems to break down when Bourdieu speaks about tools for
liberation from domination. And it is paradoxically at this juncture that
Bourdieu puts Marx in the dock, accusing him of adopting an intellectu-
alistic and scholastic perspective when he sets out to outline the process
of liberation from domination.

The Logic of Practice and the Order of Ideas

Bourdieu’s criticisms of Marx are on the same level as his more general
polemic against the mentalism and intellectualism of scholastic reason.
The sociologist accuses the Trier philosopher of using notions linked to
the dimension of consciousness and representation to account, on the
one hand, for the effects of domination and, on the other, for the pro-
pulsive force of the liberation-process. In general, Bourdieu considers
that, on this ground, “Marxist thought is more of a hindrance than a
help” (2000: 177).12 One of the harshest passages of Bourdieu’s polemic
can be found in Masculine Domination. It is worth quoting in full:

Although it is true that, even when it seems to be based on the brute force
of weapons or money, recognition of domination always presupposes an
act of knowledge, this does not imply that one is entitled to describe it in
the language of consciousness, in an intellectualist and scholastic fallacy
which, as in Marx (and above all, those who, from Lukács onwards, have
spoken of ‘false consciousness’), leads one to expect the liberation of
women to come through the immediate effect of the ‘raising of conscious-
ness’, forgetting for lack of a dispositional theory of practices—the opacity
and inertia that stem from the embedding of social structures in bodies.
(2001: 40)

In Pascalian Meditations we find similar themes:

And another effect of the scholastic illusion is seen when people describe
resistance to domination in the language of consciousness—as does the
whole Marxist tradition … who, giving way to habits of thought, expect

12
 The fact that Bourdieu’s polemic does not tell us which Marxian sources he is referring
to, and indeed often refers to Marx and Marxism indiscriminately, makes it rather difficult to
reply to this.
86  G. PAOLUCCI

political liberation to come from the ‘raising consciousness’—ignoring the

extraordinary inertia which results from the inscription of social structures
in bodies, for lack of a dispositional theory of practices. While making things
explicit can help, only a thoroughgoing process of counter training, involv-
ing repeated exercises, can, like an athlete’s training, durably transform
habitus. (2000: 172)

The doxic submission of the dominated to the objective structures of a

social order of which their cognitive structures are the product—a real mys-
tery so long as one remains enclosed in the intellectualist tradition of phi-
losophies of mind—is thus clarified. In the notion of ‘false consciousness’
which some Marxists invoke to explain the effect of symbolic domination, it
is the word ‘consciousness’ which is excessive; and to speak of ‘ideology’ is
to place in the order of representations, capable of being transformed by the
intellectual conversion that is called the ‘awakening of consciousness’, what
belongs to the order of beliefs, that is, at the deepest level of bodily disposi-
tions. (ibid.: 177)13

13
 These are not the only passages in which Bourdieu polemicises with Marx on the subject
of consciousness (and “becoming-conscious”), for there are also others. See, for example,
the essay “Culture and Politics” (included in Sociology in Question), where Bourdieu accuses
Marx of having addressed the problem of class consciousness as a theory of knowledge, and
not as a question pertaining to the deep dispositions of the body: “From the very beginning,
in Marx himself, the problem of the awakening of class consciousness has been posed rather
as philosophers pose the problem of the theory of knowledge. I think that what I’ve said this
evening helps to pose the problem rather more realistically in the form of the problem of the
shift from the deep-seated, corporeal dispositions in which a class lives without articulating
itself as such, to modes of expression both verbal and non-verbal (such as demonstrations)”
(Bourdieu 1993a: 167). In another essay included in this same volume, “Strikes and Political
Action,” Bourdieu writes “The notion of the awakening of consciousness may be defined in
maximalist or minimalist terms: is it a question of sufficient consciousness to be able to think
and express the situation (the problem of the dispossession and reappropriation of the means
of expression) and to organize and direct the struggle, or merely of sufficient consciousness
to delegate these functions to apparatuses capable of fulfilling them in the best interests of
the delegators (fides implicita)? In fact, this way of posing the problem is typically intellectu-
alist: it’s the approach that comes most naturally to intellectuals and also the one that most
conforms to the interests of intellectuals, since it makes them the indispensable mediation
between the proletariat and its revolutionary truth. In fact, as Thompson has often shown,
class consciousness and revolt can spring from processes that have nothing to do with the
kind of revolutionary cogito that intellectuals imagine […]. If one accepts, as some texts by
Marx suggest, that language can be identified with consciousness, then raising the question
of class consciousness amounts to asking what apparatus of perception and expression the
working class has in order to understand and speak of its condition” (1993b: 175–176).
 4  PUTTING MARX IN THE DOCK: PRACTICE OF LOGIC AND LOGIC…  87

Such accusations spark a certain perplexity. Before examining their

validity, it might be observed that the criticisms here levelled at Marx
could rightly be directed at Bourdieu himself, when he entrusts the task of
changing the world to a transformation of representations. If the notions
of consciousness and raising-consciousness are to be banished because
they supposedly evoke “the order of ideas” (2000: 181),14 is this not
exactly the order that Bourdieu turns to when he evokes the liberating
power of the subversive word of the prophet and the sociologist? We may
even go further and observe that when Bourdieu appeals to the order of
representation (which, in the passages quoted above, Bourdieu imputes to
Marx), and sees the liberating word of the “professional practitioners of the
work of making explicit” as an instrument for the liberation from the spell
of domination, he seems to assume a stance not dissimilar to the one Marx
railed against in his bitter polemic against German idealism (both old and
new). Bourdieu’s suggestion that access to emancipation can be brought
forth by intellectuals transferring cultural capital to the dominated seems
to have features in common with the intellectualism of the young Hegelians
against whom the Trier philosopher polemicised in The German Ideology
(Marx and Engels 1976). Indeed, in Bourdieu’s remarks on Marx, it seems
possible to detect, as we will try to show, an interpretation of Marx’s the-
ory of praxis far from what Marx’s own texts provide us with.

To Return to Marx

The Battle Against the “Critical Redeemers of the World”

As is well known, for Marx’s workings to arrive at a mature definition of
the concept of praxis,15 it had to proceed via a break with the Hegelian

14
 In a well-known passage in the Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu made explicit the rea-
sons why he had dropped the notion of ideology: “If I have little by little come to shun the
use of the word ‘ideology’, is not only because of its polysemy and the resulting ambiguities.
It is above all because, by evoking the order of ideas, and of action by ideas and on ideas, it
inclines one to forget one of the most powerful mechanisms of the maintenance of the sym-
bolic order, the two fold naturalization which results from the inscription of the social in
things and in bodies […] with the resulting effects of symbolic violence” (Bourdieu
2000: 181).
15
 It is worth pointing out that the Marxian term “die Praxis” simply means “practice,” and
not in the sense of putting theory into practice, or its application. When Marx juxtaposes “die
Theorie” and “die Praxis,” as he does in his Theses on Feuerbach, he does so in order to give
meaning to practice conceived in a new way (as we shall see further on).
88  G. PAOLUCCI

left, which marked a point of no return in the Trier philosopher’s intel-

lectual itinerary. Equally well known is the harshness with which he shred-
ded the central postulates of his erstwhile allies, starting with the theoretical
constructs of Bruno Bauer, “the critical redeemer of the world” (Marx
and Engels 1975: 143). At the heart of the polemic against Bauer is a
critique of his illusion “that a modified consciousness, a new turn given to
the interpretation of existing relations, could overturn the whole hitherto
existing world” (Marx and Engels 1976: 100–101), that is, the idea that
the act of transforming society can be reduced to the cerebral activity of
criticism, to fighting sentences with other sentences. For the idealist—
writes Marx—“every movement designed to transform the world exists
only in the head of some chosen being, and the fate of the world depends
on whether this head, which is endowed with all wisdom as its own private
property, is or is not morally wounded by some realistic stone before it has
had time to make its revelation” (Marx and Engels 1976: 532). Against
the idealism of the young Hegelians, Marx argued that given the connec-
tion that exists between all the real phenomena of bourgeois society, con-
ceived as a totality, the forms of consciousness cannot be changed sic et
simpliciter in thought but only through the process of the practical over-
throw of social relations. This formulation would take on absolute central-
ity in the Theses on Feuerbach (1976).
If we consider how Marx expressed himself with regard to the relation-
ship between consciousness and reality—looking beyond the different
tenor of his various formulations, depending on whether they are directed
against Hegelian idealism or the “ordinary, essentially metaphysical
method” of Feuerbachian materialism—we find a constant rejection of
those intellectualist, dualist and naively realist conceptions which draw a
clear line demarcating consciousness from its object. Consciousness is, for
Marx, only a particular component of being. The coincidence of con-
sciousness with reality—which, on closer inspection, characterises every
dialectic, and thus also the Marxian dialectic—is such that the material
relations of capitalist society are as they are because they are embodied in
the forms of consciousness in which they are reflected. Without them,
these relations could not exist. A critique of political economy which
lacked the idea of a coincidence between subjective consciousness and
objective reality could not have become the essential element of a theory
 4  PUTTING MARX IN THE DOCK: PRACTICE OF LOGIC AND LOGIC…  89

of praxis capable of transforming capitalist society.16 This is one of the

substantial differences between Marx’s materialist dialectics and Hegel’s
idealist dialectics. If in Hegel the theoretical consciousness of the individ-
ual cannot “jump beyond” his time and his world, nevertheless the world
is still placed within philosophy, and not philosophy in the world. For the
materialist Marx, since bourgeois society is a totality whose phenomena
are inextricably linked together, its characteristic forms of consciousness
are also intertwined with the objective world. Therefore, these forms can
be abolished only in the course of practical activity:

But these mass-minded, communist workers, employed, for instance, in

the Manchester or Lyons workshops, do not believe that by “pure think-
ing” they will be able to argue away their industrial masters and their own
practical debasement. They are most painfully aware of the difference
between being and thinking, between consciousness and life. They know
that property, capital, money, wage-labour and the like are no ideal fig-
ments of the brain but very practical, very objective products of their
self-estrangement and that therefore they must be abolished in a practical,
objective way for man to become man not only in thinking, in conscious-
ness, but in mass being, in life. Critical Criticism, on the contrary, teaches
them that they cease in reality to be wage-workers if in thinking they
abolish the thought of wage-­labour; if in thinking they cease to regard
themselves as wage-workers and, in accordance with that extravagant
notion, no longer let themselves be paid for their person. (Marx and
Engels 1975: 53)

From Philosophical Praxis to the Praxis of Non-philosophy:

The Practical Reversal
Marx did not immediately arrive at a clear delineation of the dialectical
relation between being and consciousness, between thought and life. He
did so only after he had proceeded along a certain passage, the first steps
of which are already partly detectable in his doctoral dissertation on the

16
 “The critique of political economy,” Emmanuel Renault notes, “is the fulfilment of the
Marxian historicisation of critique. It presupposes the historicisation of the theme of critique
(it is not an external critique, but an internal critique that exposes the contradictions of capi-
talism), the historicisation of the form of the critique (Capital exposes the truth of its object,
while also proceeding to examine the historical conditions of the validity of this exposition),
and the historicisation of its object (which is no longer religion or politics, but the level of
real history: the economy)” (Renault 1995).
90  G. PAOLUCCI

Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,

which he defended in 1841 (Marx 1975a).17 Although here Marx still
thought about praxis within the philosophical dimension of critique,18 and
thus did not substantially detach himself from the young Hegelians,
already in these pages we find the first emergence of a plexus of ques-
tions—the relation between philosophy and the world, and the idea of the
“overthrow” (Umschlagen) of philosophy—which would a few years later,
in a profoundly modified framework, play an essential role in the develop-
ment of the theory of praxis.19 Although Marx’s focus here was still on the
destiny of the Hegelian system and on post-Hegelian philosophy, the way
in which the theme of the “overthrowing” of philosophical theory was
posed already heralded the capital importance that the notion of

17
 The same volume of MECW also includes the seven notebooks (Marx 1975b). Here it
is not my intention to enter into the merits of the debate that has arisen around Marx’s doc-
toral dissertation and its relationship with his later works. We need only mention the fact that
one part of the critical debate (today in the minority) has advocated an interpretation accord-
ing to which the materialist conception of history is already present in nuce in this youthful
text. Among those who have fed the discussion, it is worth mentioning: Löwith (1964), Dal
Pra (1965), Cornu (1955–58), Rossi (1963, 1977), Cingoli (1981), Löwy (2002) and,
more recently, Tomba (2011) and Musto (2011).
18
 Massimiliano Tomba points out that at this point, Marx fully subscribed to Bauer’s per-
spective, according to whom, as he wrote to Marx on March 31, 1841, “theory is the stron-
gest praxis.” Different is the perspective of Karl Löwith; he believes he can discern, already
in this early text, the affirmation of “a new kind of philosophy” according to which “the
liberation of the world from non-philosophy is at the same time the liberation of non-philos-
ophy from philosophy. […] Through the realization of reason in the real world, philosophy
as such is suspended, enters into the practice of existing non-philosophy. Philosophy has
become Marxism, an immediately practical theory. Therefore, Marx is forced to attack in two
directions: against the real world, and against existing philosophy. This is so because he seeks
to unite both in an all-inclusive totality of theory and practice. His theory can become practi-
cal as criticism of what exists, as a critical differentiation between reality and idea, between
essence and existence. In the form of such criticism, his theory prepares the way for practical
changes” (Löwith 1964: 95).
19
 Mario Rossi does not believe that we can observe the materialist conception of history
in nuce already in these early texts. Indeed, he openly polemicises against those who lean
towards such an interpretation (such as the aforementioned Cornu and Löwith). Above all
examining the texts that accompanied the Dissertation, Rossi instead highlights that here we
have “a body of critical observations and reflections in which … the young philosopher docu-
ments his position, which—contrary to what it would appear from the Dissertation—is a
position of crisis and intense problematicity” (Rossi 1963: 561).
 4  PUTTING MARX IN THE DOCK: PRACTICE OF LOGIC AND LOGIC…  91

“overthrow” would take on in the theoretical scheme of revolutionary

praxis. The concept appears in the fifth notebook on Epicurean philoso-
phy, when, outlining the framework of a history of philosophy, Marx
speaks of the way in which the theoretical structure of a philosophy affects
the “destiny” of its own “overthrow.” This “turn-about of philosophy, its
transubstantiation into flesh and blood, varies according to the determina-
tion which a philosophy total and concrete in itself bears as its birthmark.
[…] From the philosophical point of view it is important to bring out this
aspect, because, reasoning back from the determinate character of this
turn-about, we can form a conclusion concerning the immanent determi-
nation and the world-historical character of the process of development of
a philosophy” (Marx 1975b: 492–93).
The underlining of the decisive conditionality of philosophy on the
world—and not vice versa—serves to highlight the distance that still had
to be covered before Marx could arrive at the conception of a philosophy
that turns outwards and comes into contact with the world: a philosophy
that, transcending itself, enters into the praxis of non-philosophy.20 And
yet, already in this suggestion, even posed in such general terms, we can
see the onset of the path that would a few years later lead to the full
unfolding of a theory of praxis that dialectically interweaves consciousness
and the practical overthrow of existing social relations:

This conception of history […] does not explain practice from the idea but
explains the formation of ideas from material practice, and accordingly it
comes to the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot
be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into “self-consciousness or
transformation into “apparitions”, “spectres”, “whimsies”, etc., but only by
practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this ide-
alistic humbug; … not the criticism but revolution is the driving force of
history, also of religion, of philosophy and all other kinds of theory. (Marx
and Engels 1976: 53–54)

The break with the internal conception of philosophical critique and

the onset of a thought aimed at defining the contours of the practical
transformation of the world began to take shape in the articles which Marx

20
 According to Löwith (1964), conversely, this perspective is already fully developed in
these early pages.
92  G. PAOLUCCI

published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in the mid-1840s.21

Already in the Introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Law, he posed the question of the relationship in a com-
pletely new way: “In the struggle against those conditions criticism is no
passion of the head, it is the head of passion. It is not a lancet, it is a
weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it wants not to refute but to exter-
minate […]. Criticism appears no longer as an end in itself, but only as a
means” (Marx 1975c: 177). Marx himself describes the rupture that he
had to go through, when he notes in the Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844 that

we see how subjectivity and objectivity, spirituality and materiality, activity

and suffering, lose their antithetical character, and thus their existence as
such antitheses only within the framework of society; (we see how the reso-
lution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue
of the practical energy of man. Their resolution is therefore by no means
merely a problem of understanding, but a real problem of life, which philoso-
phy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a
theoretical one. (Marx 1975d: 302)

It has been amply highlighted22 that this change of perspective was not
the effect of an evolution entirely internal to philosophical speculation,
but rather a result of Marx’s political experiences during his stay in Paris,
during which he met proletarians in the flesh as well as French worker-­
communism. It was above all the revolt of the Silesian weavers, of whose
theoretical and conscious character he is firmly convinced, that marked the
decisive turning point in the itinerary that led Marx to the definition of a
theory of praxis. The ripening process of this turning point is attested not
only by the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Law but also by Marx’s correspondence with Arnold Ruge,

21
 Henri Lefebvre observes, in this regard: “The works of Marx’s youth, which have too
often been taken, and are still taken, as ‘philosophical works’, contain precisely this radical
critique. Philosophy must be superseded. It realizes itself by superseding itself and abolishes
itself by realizing itself. The becoming-philosophy of the world gives way to the becoming-
world of philosophy, revolutionary realization and superseding of philosophy as such. Each
philosophical notion, inasmuch as it enters into the ‘real’ (into praxis), becomes world, it is
accomplished. Inasmuch as it is accomplished, every philosophy is superseded” (Lefebvre
2000: 62–63).
22
 See among others, on this score, Lukács (1954); Löwy (2002); Tomba (2011);
Musto (2011).
 4  PUTTING MARX IN THE DOCK: PRACTICE OF LOGIC AND LOGIC…  93

also published in the only issue of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher;23

by the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; and by the Critical
Marginal Notes on the Article “The King of Prussia and Social Reform”
(1975e), a critique of Ruge’s reductive reading of the Silesian movement.
The themes in these pages—which are heterogeneous, in terms of the
distance between theorising that remained entirely internal to the philo-
sophical field of the preceding years and the completeness of the elabora-
tion of the notion of praxis—reached their synthesis in the Theses on
Feuerbach. Marx destroyed “under these eleven purposeful hammer blows
all the supporting beams of the hitherto bourgeois philosophy” (Korsch
1993: 135),24 and reduced to dust both Feuerbachian materialism—which
conceives perceptible reality not as a product of perceptible human activ-
ity, of praxis, but solely in the form of intuition (theoria), as a ready-made
object—and idealism, which, though valorising the productive activity of
the subject, considers it in an abstract way, as a position of the spirit. Each
is unable to understand activity as objective and “practical-critical,” that is,
the only activity capable of modifying the human world. Because of their
unilateralism, both the old materialism and idealism fail to recognise that
praxis has a double face: the former because it conceives of the given con-
ditions as independent of activity, and the latter because it contrasts the
given conditions with an activity considered to be unconditioned. The
former privileges the perceptible objectivity of the pre-given, whereas the
latter valorises a subject conceived as self-conscious. Marx transcends this

23
 In the context of a discussion on the contents and aims of the Deutsch-Französische
Jahrbücher, Marx affirms the need for philosophy to shift the terrain of intervention, and to
descend—in a Feuerbachian manner—from heaven to earth and grapple with the real world:
“Now philosophy has become mundane, and the most striking proof of this is that philo-
sophical consciousness itself has been drawn into the torment of the struggle, not only exter-
nally but also internally. But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times
are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring
to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the
results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that
be” (Marx 1975f: 142). It would not be out of place to see, in these words, an anticipation
of the eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach. On this theme, see D. Bensaïd (1995).
24
 Quotation translated from German by the author. The Korsch’s text Der Standpunkt der
materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung (1922), published in Marxismus und Philosophie.
Schriften zur Theorie der Arbeiterbewegung 1920-1923 (Amsterdam: Stichting beheer IISG
1993), is not included in the English version [Marxism and Philosophy. Partial Trans.
F. Halliday. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971].
94  G. PAOLUCCI

dualism of the acting subject and the given object by removing practical
activity from the scheme of self-consciousness.
This aspect is especially interesting for our discussion of the
Bourdieusian critique of the Marxian vision of the relationship between
consciousness and revolutionary praxis: from Marx’s double critique of
Feuerbach and idealism springs a notion of praxis that produces the per-
ceptible object at the same time as it produces the subject of this production.
Thus praxis’s status as an “objective activity” resides in the fact that it is
not the activity of a subject constituted prior to the perceptible activity,
but the activity through which individuals produce both the world in
which they are located and themselves as subjects belonging to this
world.25 Hence, the vision of revolutionary praxis as a dialectical rela-
tionship between the “changing of men and the changing of circum-
stances.” At this turning point, the “raising of consciousness”—the
target of Bourdieu’s polemics—does not appear as a dispositif situated at
the order of representations, disconnected from the concreteness of
practices, as his reading would tell us. On the contrary, it is a mediation
between the objective misery of proletarian life, and action. It is this
function that explains Marx’s emphasis on the revolutionary capacity of
the working masses, which does not postulate any help from outside.
Inextricably linked to praxis—“practical-critical activity”—the awareness
of being subjected to absolute injustice (das Unrecht schlechthin) devel-
ops in the course of the process of social transformation in which the
proletarians directly participate.

In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society

which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all
estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering
and claims no particular right because no particular wrong but wrong
generally is perpetrated against it; which can no longer invoke a historical
but only a human title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis
to the consequences but in an all-round antithesis to the premises of the
German State; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without
emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emanci-
pating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of
man and hence can win itself only through the complete rewinning of
man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.
(Marx 1975c: 186)

25
 For an interpretation along these lines, see Dardot (2015) and Macherey (2008).
 4  PUTTING MARX IN THE DOCK: PRACTICE OF LOGIC AND LOGIC…  95

In this process, praxis can effectively become “revolutionary,” in the

dual movement of transforming nature and society, only insofar as it gains
a unity of consciousness and action. But not only that. As the dialectical
overcoming of subject and object, of thought and being, consciousness
and action, praxis is the only instrument of self-emancipation. And it is
here, in the conception of proletarian self-emancipation as a coincidence
between the change of circumstances and the transformation of men, that
Marx’s most significant move is to be found—and indeed, the most bla-
tant refutation of Bourdieu’s reading of it. The vision of praxis as the self-­
liberation and self-transformation of the proletariat, as opposed to the
Feuerbachian doctrine of materialism—which is bound to divide society
into two parts, one of which is superior to society (Marx 1976:7)—is
elaborated as a theory of transformative action by the dominated subjects
themselves. As against the postulates of idealism and mechanistic material-
ism, Marx asserts that the change of circumstances external to the subject
is co-extensive with the transformation of the subject itself: “In revolu-
tionary activity the changing of oneself coincides with the changing of cir-
cumstances” (Marx and Engels 1976:214). In doing so, praxis not only
destroys the ancien régime, that is, the barriers external to the subject, but
also consciousness, the internal barriers.
In this movement, consciousness is therefore not a dimension external
to praxis, a discursive appendage mechanically applied to action, as
Bourdieu’s reading would have it, and as he himself contradictorily goes
so far as to argue when he hands the heresiarch the keys to breaking out
of the spell of domination. Consciousness is dialectically intertwined with
the practical movement that subjects enact in the process of transforming
the social world:

Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness,

and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale
is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement,
a revolution. The revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the
ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because this
class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself off all
the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew. (Marx and
Engels 1976: 52–53)
96  G. PAOLUCCI

The overcoming of alienation can thus only be realised in a non-­

alienated way, that is, by bringing praxis to the living flesh of the domi-
nated. There can be no other way, for the character of the new order that
the practical overthrow is called on to construct is closely linked by the
quality of the process that leads to this transformation, in the course of
which the proletariat “rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its
previous position in the society” (ibid.: 88). No deus ex machina is thus
able to replace the collective action of the dominated against the capitalist
mode of production—a mode that produces and reproduces an absolute
injustice indelibly built into an order that determines the isolation of the
worker from the true human community. Against this, praxis is the site of
the actual opposition between the ersatz community which establishes
itself under the dominion of the separation of individual and totality, and
the new community that springs from a union “which again has associa-
tion as its end” (ibid.: 313).26

Logic of Practice or Practice of Logic?

Bourdieu always asserted the need for sociology to unveil the mechanisms
that underlie the reproduction of the social order, considering this to be
an indispensable task much more important than the analysis of social
change. The fact that “the objectivity of the subjective experience of rela-
tions of domination” (Bourdieu 2001: 34) is placed at the centre of his
research fully responded to this aim, which he pursued with great rigour
and originality. This allowed him to develop a research orientation focused
on dimensions of subjection that the social sciences have otherwise mostly
neglected. From this point of view, not only is the Bourdieusian theory of

26
 This is a well-known passage from the Manuscripts, but given its relevance to the argu-
ment that we are advancing it is worth citing it at length: “In order to abolish the idea of
private property, the idea of communism is quite sufficient. It takes actual communist action
to abolish actual private property. […] When communist artisans associate with one another,
theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association,
they acquire a new need—the need for society—and what appears as a means becomes an
end. In this practical process the most splendid results are to be observed whenever French
socialist workers are seen together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no
longer means of contact or means that bring them together. Association, society and conver-
sation, which again has association as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man
is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from
their work-hardened bodies” (Marx 1975d: 313).
 4  PUTTING MARX IN THE DOCK: PRACTICE OF LOGIC AND LOGIC…  97

symbolic power in no way opposed to the Marxian theory of class domina-

tion, but it constitutes a considerable enrichment of it.27
As we have tried to show, it is only when Bourdieu seeks a concrete (or,
if you will, practical) political outlet for his critique of domination that the
picture breaks down, giving rise to results that are not entirely convincing.
These outcomes cannot be ascribed—as a conspicuous critical literature
would have it—to a supposed determinism of the theoretical framework
itself. As Bourdieu never tired of repeating, social determinations are not
in the eye of the beholder, but in things.28 In other words, the vision of the
process of liberation from domination is not already inscribed in the the-
ory of habitus, as some claim.29 When Bourdieu thinks of habitus as “struc-
tured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures”
(Bourdieu 1992: 53), he recognises that the agent has a generative and
constructive power, which—despite all the limits imposed by social condi-
tions and subjection to domination—nevertheless enables a structuring
dimension able to mould the world.
It is only when he sets out to construct a theoretical scheme aimed at
solving the dilemma of liberation that the osmosis between the two dimen-
sions vanishes and the scene becomes that of a closed, static—indeed, not
very materialist—system. Inexplicably absent from this scene are practices
and the body—a crucial topos, as we have seen, of the theoretical scheme
used in the analysis of domination. If the dialectic between the ego and the
world is established in the materiality of the body and in practical knowl-
edge; and if this is the materialist theory capable of recovering, as Bourdieu
repeatedly asserts, the active side of consciousness that the materialist tra-
dition has abandoned;30 then why put out them out of the play at the very

27
 For this reading, see among others, Wacquant (2002); Fowler (2011, 2020), a version
of which is published in Paolucci (2018). Of a totally different opinion is Fabiani, who con-
siders that Bourdieu’s project consists in replacing Marxism with another general theory
(Fabiani 2016). For a critique of this interpretation and of the overall perspective adopted by
Fabiani, see Joly (2018) and Fowler’s review of Joly’s book (Fowler 2018).
28
 “The degree to which the social world seems to us to be determined depends on the
knowledge we have of it. On the other hand, the degree to which the world is really deter-
mined is not a question of opinion; as a sociologist, it’s not for me to be ‘for determinism’ or
‘for freedom’, but to discover necessity, if it exists, in the places where it is. Because all prog-
ress in the knowledge of the laws of the social world increases the degree of perceived neces-
sity, it is natural that social science is increasingly accused of ‘determinism’ the further it
advances” (Bourdieu 1993c: 25).
29
 For this reading see, among others, Jenkins (1992).
30
 See also Bourdieu (1990), first essay on the field of philosophy.
98  G. PAOLUCCI

moment when they could be fundamental dimensions for a theory of a

political practice for transforming the social world?31
This absence, which is also a self-disavowal, constitutes one of the main
aspects of the difficulties we find in Bourdieu’s thought on subversion.
They derive from the failure to carry out the programme of “negative
philosophy” that led him to side with Pascal against Descartes and to
adopt one of the central themes of anti-philosophy: namely, the denuncia-
tion of the errors to which the “half-learned” are led, when they believe
they can see the world by putting it at a distance, while excluding them-
selves from it. By proclaiming his intention to transcend the privileges of
scientific thought; and by pursuing a knowledge of social space that
includes the subject of knowledge itself, with a critical reflection on the
self; Bourdieu manages to think practice without erasing its object. It is in
the need to be both inside and outside at the same time that we should see
the sense of Bourdieu’s long and complex work to drive intellectualism
and scholastic fallacy from his horizons, and thus give life to a fully con-
crete knowing subject that can critically self-reflect. Here we find a signifi-
cant link with the Marx who wanted to bring thought back from heaven
to earth, leaving behind once and for all the illusion that philosophical
critique can intervene in the human world without transcending the
sphere of its own operation. However, for Marx it was also very clear that
to overcome the contradiction inherent in the social conditions of the
exercise of critical thought, it is not enough simply to bring it out into the
open. It is necessary to stop considering intellectual critique as the (only)
instrument of social transformation and to transform it into a “practical
movement,” making it practical.
This is where the gap lies. The two paths that Bourdieu sketched out—
the elaboration of a practical logic and the development of a critique of the
conditions of theoretical detachment (Karsenti 2013)—complement and
support each other in the architecture of the theory of domination. But
when it comes to thinking about the space of politics, they become
detached from one another, leaving in the shade the practical process of
liberation from domination. The logic of practice thus gives way to the
practice of logic, as if the former were not allowed to lay its hands on the
terrain of social transformation.

31
 The reference obviously only concerns the theoretical level and not Pierre Bourdieu’s
political activity, which, as we know, was very intensive, especially from the early 1990s
onward (cf. Bourdieu 2002, 2003, 2008).
 4  PUTTING MARX IN THE DOCK: PRACTICE OF LOGIC AND LOGIC…  99

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 CHAPTER 5

The Poverty of Philosophy: Marx Meets

Bourdieu

Michael Burawoy

Economic conditions first transformed the mass of the people of the

country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this
mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a
class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which
we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and
constitutes as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class
interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle
—(Karl Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, 1847)
The historical success of Marxist theory, the first social theory to claim
scientific status that has so completely realized its potential in the social
world, thus contributes to ensuring that the theory of the social world
which is the least capable of integrating the theory effect—that it,
more than any other, has created—is doubtless, today, the most powerful
obstacle to the progress of the adequate theory of the social world to
which it has, in times gone by, more than any other contributed
—(Pierre Bourdieu, Social Spaces and the Genesis of “Classes,” 1984)

M. Burawoy (*)
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
e-mail: burawoy@berkeley.edu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 103

Switzerland AG 2022
G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and
Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_5
104  M. BURAWOY

What is Bourdieu saying here? The historical success of Marxism is to have

constituted the idea of class out of a bundle of attributes shared by an
arbitrary assemblage of people, what he calls “class on paper.” Aided by
parties, trade unions, the media and propaganda—an “immense historical
labor of theoretical and practical invention, starting with Marx himself”
(Bourdieu  1991: 251)—Marxism effectively called forth the representa-
tion and, through representation, the belief in the existence of the “work-
ing class” as a real “social fiction” that otherwise would have had only
potential existence.
However, this representation of and belief in the working class is a far
cry from “class as action, a real and really mobilized group,” let alone a
revolutionary actor as imagined by the Marxist tradition, which suffers
from a self-misunderstanding. It does not see itself as constituting the idea
and representation of the working class but as a scientific theory discover-
ing and then expressing the historical emergence of an objective “class-in-­
itself” that was destined to become a “class-for-itself” making history in its
own image. Marx’s claim is summarized in the quotation above from the
Poverty of Philosophy where Marx excoriates Proudhon for confusing real-
ity and economic categories, for making the intellectualist error of seeing
history as the emanation of ideas rather than ideas as the expression of
reality. Bourdieu is now turning the tables back against Marxism.
Marxism, Bourdieu argues, did not have the tools to understand its
own effect—“theory effect”—without which, according to Bourdieu,
there would be no “working class.” In short, Marxism could not compre-
hend its own power—the power of its symbols and its political interven-
tions—because it did not possess a theory of symbolic power. In the
beginning this lacuna did not matter as the economy still constituted the
only autonomous field in mid-nineteenth-century Europe and the sym-
bolic world was still underdeveloped. However, with the elaboration of
separate cultural, scientific, educational, legal and bureaucratic fields in the
late nineteenth-century, Marxism lost its grip on reality and its theory
became retrograde, becoming a “powerful obstacle to the progress of the
adequate theory of the social world” (Bourdieu 1991: 251). These fields
of symbolic production engendered their own domination effects, over-
riding and countering Marxism’s symbolic power that had depended on
the predominance of the economy.
Disarmed both as science and ideology, Marxism is unable to compete
with other theories that place symbolic power at the centre of analysis. As
 5  THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY: MARX MEETS BOURDIEU  105

science Marxism does not understand that a classification or representa-

tional struggle has to precede class struggle, that is, classes have to be
constituted symbolically before they can engage in struggle. This requires
a theory of cultural production that it fails to elaborate. As ideology, with-
out such a theory, Marxism can no longer compete in the classification
struggle over the visions and divisions of society. Marxism loses its sym-
bolic power, and the working class retreats back to a class on paper—
merely an analytical category of an academic theory. Marxism becomes
regressive, an obstacle to the development of social theory.
Bourdieu mounts a powerful indictment of Marx and Engels, but
pointedly misses the significance of Western Marxism—from Korsch to
Lukács, from Gramsci to the Frankfurt School—whose raison d’être was to
wrestle with the problem of cultural domination. Many of their ideas are
congruent with Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic domination.1 To under-
stand what the Marxist tradition has accomplished in this regard it is nec-
essary to first concentrate on the real limitations of Marx and Engels.
Against Bourdieu’s sweeping dismissal I restore the voices of the founding
figures, repressed in Bourdieu’s writings, to create a more balanced
exchange. The imaginary conversation that follows, therefore, is neither a
combat sport nor a higher synthesis but rather aims at mutual clarification.
By posing each theory as a challenge to the other, we can better appreciate
their distinctiveness—their defining anomalies and contradictions as well
as their divergent problematiques.
Since Marx and Engels predate Bourdieu, it is they who set the terms
of the conversation, but the framing will be most favourable to Bourdieu’s
critique, namely, the postulates of historical materialism. First, history is
seen as a succession of modes of production, arranged in ascending order
according to the development of the forces of production. Second, each
mode of production has a dynamics of its own within which reproduction
gives rise to transformation and finally self-destruction. Third, ideological
domination is secured through the superstructures of society as well as in
the relations of production. Fourth, class struggle arches forward, dissolv-
ing mystification to guarantee the transition to communism. Each
postulate raises as many questions for Bourdieu as it does for Marx
and Engels.

1
 Indeed, some, such as Perry Anderson (1976), regarded Western Marxism as an idealistic
betrayal of classical Marxism.
106  M. BURAWOY

To begin a conversation, there needs to be a point of departure that is

also a point of agreement. That point of agreement is their common cri-
tique of philosophy that Marx2 calls “ideology” and Bourdieu calls “scho-
lastic reason.” They both repudiate the illusory ideas of intellectuals and
turn to the logic of practice—labour in the case of Marx, bodily practice in
the case of Bourdieu. This leads Marx to the working class and its revolu-
tionary potential, while Bourdieu moves in the opposite direction—from
the dominated back to the dominant classes who exercise symbolic vio-
lence. I show how Marx ends up in a materialist cul-de-sac, while Bourdieu
ends up in an idealist cul-de-sac. No less than Marx, but for different
reasons, Bourdieu cannot grasp his own “theory effect.” They each break
out of their respective dead ends in ad hoc ways that contradict the prem-
ises of their theories—paradoxes that lay the foundations for the elabora-
tion of two opposed traditions.

Divergent Paths from the Critique of Philosophy

Uncanny parallels join Marx and Engels’s critique of the “German ideol-
ogy” (Tucker 1978: 146–200) and Bourdieu’s critique of “scholastic rea-
son” in Pascalian Meditations (2000). In The German Ideology, Marx and
Engels settle accounts with Hegel and the Young Hegelians, just as in
Pascalian Meditations Bourdieu settles his scores with his own philosophi-
cal rivals. Both condemn philosophy’s disposition to dismiss practical
engagement with the world. As Marx writes in the first thesis on Feuerbach,
the German philosophers elevate the theoretical attitude as the “only gen-
uinely human attitude,” while practice is only conceived in “its dirty-­
judaical manifestation.” Bourdieu’s immersion in the Algerian war of
independence and his experience of the raw violence of colonialism call
into question the relevance of his philosophical training at the École
Normale Supérieure just as, for Marx, the horrors of the industrial

 Throughout this essay I will be referring to Marx except where he is a joint author with
2

Engels. This is not to belittle the contribution of Engels but to reflect Bourdieu’s focus on
Marx whenever he is not making blanket statements about Marxism.
 5  THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY: MARX MEETS BOURDIEU  107

revolution in Britain made nonsense of the lofty pretensions of German

idealism.3
Still, Pascalian Meditations is Bourdieu’s culminating theoretical work
in which Pascal is presented as an inspirational philosophical break with
philosophy, centring the importance of the practice of ordinary people,
emphasizing symbolic power exercised over the body and refusing the
emanation of pure philosophy from the heads of philosophers. The German
Ideology is not a culminating work, but an originating work that clears the
foundations for Marx’s theory of historical materialism and materialist his-
tory. Although they appear at different stages in their careers, the argu-
ment against philosophy is, nonetheless, surprisingly similar.
Let us begin with Marx and Engels scoffing at the Young Hegelians
who think they are making history, when they are but counter-poising one
phrase to another:

As we hear from German ideologists, Germany has in the last few years gone
through an unparalleled revolution. The decomposition of the Hegelian
philosophy … has developed into a universal ferment into which all the
‘powers of the past’ are swept. … It was a revolution besides which the
French Revolution was child’s play, a world struggle beside which the strug-
gles of the Diadochi appear insignificant. Principles ousted one another,
heroes of the mind overthrew each other with unheard-of rapidity and in the
three years 1842–45 more of the past was swept away in Germany than at
other times in three centuries. All this is supposed to have taken place in the
realm of pure thought. (Tucker 1978: 147)

Here is Bourdieu’s parallel attack on modern and postmodern

philosophers:

Now, if there is one thing that our ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’ philosophers

have in common, beyond the conflicts that divide them, it is this excessive
confidence in the powers of language. It is the typical illusion of the lector,
who can regard an academic commentary as a political act or the critique of

3
 Here is how Marx and Engels berate Feuerbach: “Thus if millions of proletarians feel by
no means contented with their living conditions, if their ‘existence’ does not in the least cor-
respond to their ‘essence’ then … this is an unavoidable misfortune, which must be borne
quietly. The millions of proletarians and communists, however, think differently and will
prove this in time, when they bring their ‘existence’ into harmony with their ‘essence’ in a
practical way, by means of revolution” (Tucker 1978: 168).
108  M. BURAWOY

texts as a feat of resistance, and experience revolutions in the order of words

as radical revolutions in the order of things. (Bourdieu 2000: 2)

The argument is the same: we must not confuse a war of words with the
transformation of the real world, things of logic with the logic of things.
But how is it that philosophers mistake their own world for the real
world? The answer lies in their oblivion to the social and economic condi-
tions under which they produce knowledge. For Marx, it is simply the
division between mental and manual labour that permits the illusion that
ideas or consciousness drives history:

Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a divi-
sion of material and mental labour appears. From this moment onwards con-
sciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of
existing practice, that it really represents something without representing
something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate
itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of ‘pure’ theory, the-
ology, philosophy, ethics, etc. (Tucker 1978: 159; emphasis added)

Emancipated from manual labour, upon which their existence never-

theless rests, philosophers imagine that history is moved by their thought.
“It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers,” Marx and Engels
(Tucker  1978: 149) write, “to inquire into the connection of German
philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own
material surroundings.”
In identical fashion, Bourdieu argues that philosophers fail to under-
stand the peculiarity of the conditions that make it possible to produce
“pure” theory:

But there is no doubt nothing more difficult to apprehend, for those who
are immersed in universes in which it goes without saying, than the scho-
lastic disposition demanded by those universes. There is nothing that ‘pure’
thought finds it harder to think than skholè, the first and most determi-
nant of all the social conditions of possibility of ‘pure’ thought, and also
the scholastic disposition which inclines its possessors to suspend the
demands of the situation, the constraints of economic and social necessity.
(Bourdieu 2000: 12)

The scholastic disposition calls forth the illusion that knowledge is

freely produced and that it is not the product of specific conditions very
 5  THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY: MARX MEETS BOURDIEU  109

different from the dominated classes who are driven by material necessity.
Bourdieu does not limit his critique of the scholastic fallacy—that is,
repression of the conditions peculiar to intellectual life—to philosophers
but broadens it to other disciplines. He criticizes anthropologists, such as
Lévi-Strauss, and economists for universalizing their own particular expe-
rience, foisting their abstract models onto the recalcitrant practice of ordi-
nary mortals. Much as Marx is contemptuous of the Young Hegelians,
Bourdieu satirizes Sartre’s existentialist renditions of everyday life—the
waiter who contemplates the heavy decision of whether to get up in the
morning or not. For most people most of the time, argues Bourdieu,
mundane tasks are accomplished without reflection. Only sociologists—
reflexively applying sociology to themselves and, more generally, to the
production of knowledge—can potentially appreciate the limitations of
scholastic reason, and the necessary distinction between the logic of the-
ory and the logic of practice.
If both Marx and Bourdieu are critical of intellectuals who think ideas
drive history, their corresponding turns to practice are very different. For
Marx, it is a turn to the conditions of labour that produce the means of
existence.

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but
real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination.
They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under
which they live, both those which they find already existing and those pro-
duced by their activity. (Tucker 1978: 149)

It is from these material conditions of production that Marx derives the

dynamics of capitalism and deepening class struggle. For Bourdieu this is
a mythology—albeit a powerful one at certain points in history—created
by intellectuals unable to comprehend the inurement of workers to their
conditions of existence because, as intellectuals, they misrecognize the
peculiarity of their own conditions of existence. Or as he pithily puts it:
“Populism is never anything other than an inverted ethnocentrism”
(Bourdieu 1984: 374). Instead of the transformative power of working
class, Bourdieu turns to the generative power of habitus implanted in a
socialized body.

In other words, one has to construct a materialist theory which (in accor-
dance with the wish that Marx expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach) is capa-
110  M. BURAWOY

ble of taking from idealism the ‘active side’ of practical knowledge that the
materialist tradition has abandoned to it. This is precisely the notion of the
function of habitus, which restores to the agent a generating, unifying, con-
structing, classifying power, while recalling that this capacity to construct
social reality, itself socially constructed, is not that of a transcendental sub-
ject but of a socialized body, investing in its practice socially constructed
organizing principles that are acquired in the course of a situated and dated
social experience. (Bourdieu 2000: 136–7)

As the unconscious incorporation of social structure, habitus leads

Bourdieu not only to abandon the working class as “transcendental sub-
ject” but the very possibility that the dominated can grasp the conditions
of their subjugation, something only the sociologist can apprehend. The
sociologist, and more broadly the “International of Intellectuals,” thereby
becomes Bourdieu’s putative “transcendental subject.”
In short, after breaking with ideology/scholastic reason and arriving at
the logic of practice, Marx and Bourdieu then take diametrically opposed
paths—the one focuses on the dominated embedded in production rela-
tions, whereas the other turns his back on the dominated in order to
return to the dominant producing symbolic relations. The remainder of
this chapter explores these two roads—how they diverge and create their
own distinctive sets of paradoxes and dilemmas.

History: From Modes of Productions

to Differentiated Fields

Out of their common critiques of philosophy arise divergent conceptions

of history. For Marx the logic of practice is embedded in the concrete
social relations into which men and women enter as they transform nature.
These social relations form the mode of production with two components:
the forces of production (relations through which men and women col-
laborate in producing the means of existence, including the mode of coop-
eration and the technology it deploys) and the relations of production (the
relations of exploitation through which surplus is produced by a class of
direct producers and appropriated by a dominant class). Modes of produc-
tion succeed each other in a sequence measured by the expansion of the
forces of production. As the final mode of production, capitalism gives
way to communism, which, being without classes and thus without exploi-
tation, allows for the realization of human talents and needs. It is only
 5  THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY: MARX MEETS BOURDIEU  111

with capitalism that the direct producers, that is, the working class,
through their struggles against capital, come to recognize their role as
agents of human emancipation.
Bourdieu rejects Marx’s teleology as an intellectual fantasy of history,
leaving himself without any explicit theory of history and, therefore, no
conception of an alternative future. Still, his work describes a movement
from traditional to modern marked, first and foremost, by different con-
ception of time—the one in which the future is the repetition of the past,
cyclical time, and the other in which the future is indefinite, full of possi-
bilities and susceptible to rational planning. Additionally, along
Durkheimian lines, Bourdieu (1979) distinguishes traditional society in
Algeria from the modern society in France by the emergence and differen-
tiation of fields (autonomous spheres of action) and by the pluralization of
“capitals”—resources accumulated within fields and convertible
across fields.
Where Marx has a succession of modes of production that govern
human behaviour, Bourdieu has multiple coexisting “fields.” They appear
as elaborations of Marx’s “superstructures”—“legal, political, religious,
aesthetic or philosophical forms in which men become conscious of this
[class] conflict and fight it out.” Thus, Bourdieu has written extended
essays on the legal, the political, the bureaucratic, the religious, the philo-
sophical, the journalistic, the scientific, the artistic and the educational
fields. The notion of field draws on and generalizes certain features of
Marx’s concept of the capitalist mode of production. Indeed, underlining
that association, Bourdieu refers to cultural fields as the political economy
of symbolic goods.
As with the capitalist mode of production, so with the notion of field,
individuals enter into relations of competition to accumulate field-specific
capital according to field-specific rules. Competition among actors takes
place alongside struggles for domination of the field—struggles whose
objects are the very rules and stakes that define the field and its capital. In
his analysis of the scientific field (Bourdieu 1975), for example, competi-
tion leads to the concentration of academic capital, so that challenges from
below can either follow a pattern of succession, holding onto the coat-tails
of a powerful figure, or the more risky subversive strategies that change
the rules of the game and, if successful, can generate far more capital in the
long run. When capital is diffused and competition intense, dominant
groups can be overthrown in a “revolution,” but when capital is more
112  M. BURAWOY

heavily concentrated, then change is more continuous, what he calls a

“permanent revolution.”
The analogy to Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production is
clear, except that there is no mention of exploitation. It is as if capitalism
were confined to competition and domination among capitalists, with
workers removed from the field. As Mathieu Desan (2013) has argued at
length, Bourdieu’s conception of field rests on a notion of capital that is
far from Marx’s—the accumulation of resources rather than a relation of
exploitation.4 Indeed, Bourdieu’s only book devoted to the economy as
such, The Social Structures of the Economy (2005), concerns the social
underpinning of the housing market. Here Bourdieu focuses on the role
of habitus and taste in the matching of supply and demand for different
types of housing. There is no attempt to study housing from the stand-
point of its production process—from the standpoint of construction
workers, for example. When he turns to the firm as a field again he focuses
on the managers and directors who make decisions rather than workers
who produce the goods without which there would be no decisions. Fields
are confined to the dominant classes, whereas the dominated classes only
inhabit the structures of social space.
Bourdieu replaces Marx’s diachronic succession of modes of produc-
tion, which pays little attention to the superstructures, with a synchronic
account of the functioning and coexistence of fields. This poses the ques-
tion of the relations among fields, marked by the recognition of autono-
mous and heteronomous poles within each field. In Rules of Art (Bourdieu
1996a) Bourdieu describes the genesis of the literary field in nineteenth-­
century France. At its core was Flaubert’s drive for literature for litera-
ture’s sake, which required a break, on the one hand, from art sponsored
by the bourgeoisie, and, on the other hand, from social realism connected
to everyday life. Bourdieu builds into each field a struggle for autonomy
against the heteronomous influence of external fields—a struggle that is
complicated by challenges to the consecrated elites from the avant-garde.
In his later writings he was particularly concerned with the economic
field’s subversion of the autonomy of other fields. Thus, in his book on
television, Bourdieu (1999) describes the subjugation of the journalistic
field to the economic field through advertising revenue that demands the

4
 As Jacques Bidet (2008) emphasizes the dynamics of Bourdieu’s fields relies on the strug-
gle and competition among its agents rather than an underlying structure equivalent to the
interaction of the forces and relations of production.
 5  THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY: MARX MEETS BOURDIEU  113

widest appeal through banalities, sensationalism and fabrication. This, in

turn, distorted the dissemination of knowledge and accomplishments of
other fields, not least the field of social science, through amateurish inter-
mediaries he calls doxosophers who neutralize any critical message. No
less than other fields, the political field is also subject to controlling inter-
vention from economic actors. Although he gives dominance to the eco-
nomic field, Bourdieu has no theory of the economy and its expansive
tendencies.
In addition to the domination of the economic field, Bourdieu describes
a field of power that traverses different fields, bringing together their elites
into a shared competition for power. This rather amorphous arrangement
reminds one of Weber’s separate value spheres with a realm of power that
oversees society, but again there is no analysis of its dynamics. Still, what is
notably missing is any theory of the relations of interdependence and
domination among fields. As Gil Eyal (2013) has noted, it is curious that
someone so concerned about relations within fields pays so little attention
to the relations among fields. Just as there is no theory of history, there is
no theory of the totality, just an arbitrary assemblage of supposedly
“homologous” fields.5

Dynamics: From Self-Transformation to Hysteresis

We have seen the contrast between Marx’s history as the succession of
modes of production and Bourdieu’s vision of coexisting fields, but Marx
also has a notion of history as the dynamics of a mode of production,
namely, the way the reproduction of capitalism is simultaneously its trans-
formation. Indeed, the capitalist mode of production distinguishes itself
by reproducing itself of itself, very different from the feudal mode of pro-
duction that requires extra-economic coercion. Under capitalism the
worker arrives at work each day to produce value that contributes to her
wage on the one side and capitalist profit on the other. Needing to survive

5
 While Talcott Parsons and Pierre Bourdieu share a commitment to a general theory of
action, Parsons develops four analytical subsystems (analogous to fields) whose functions—
adaptive, goal attainment, integrative and latency—contribute to society as a whole and
whose interdependence is orchestrated through universal media of interchange (money,
power, influence and value commitment) that are parallel to Bourdieu’s “capitals.” From
here Parsons develops a theory of history as differentiation, governed by evolutionary uni-
versals. Bourdieu makes no attempt to advance such a grand account of history and totality.
Indeed, he recoils from any such project. He systematically refuses systematicity.
114  M. BURAWOY

she comes to work and does the same the next day. But as capitalism
reproduces itself in this way, so it also transforms itself. As capitalists com-
pete with one another, they innovate by reducing the proportion of the
worker’s day contributing to the wage (necessary labour) and increasing
the proportion contributing to profit (surplus labour)—through the
intensification of work, deskilling, new technology and so on—which
leads to class polarization and crises of overproduction. Is there an equiva-
lent in Bourdieu whereby reproduction becomes the basis of social change?
At the heart of Bourdieu’s theory of reproduction is the notion of
“habitus,” a concept first developed in relation to the traditional Kabyle
society.

The habitus, the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvi-

sations, produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities imma-
nent in the objective conditions of the production of their generative
principle, while adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentiali-
ties in the situation, as defined by the cognitive and motivating structures
making up the habitus. (Bourdieu 1977: 78)

So structures generate practices that reproduce structures through the

mediation of habitus that is itself the product of structures, but such
reproduction allows room for innovation within limits defined by struc-
tures. It is parallel to Marx’s formula: “Men make their own history, but
they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected
circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and trans-
mitted from the past.” From Bourdieu’s point of view what is missing here
is the way individuals carry the past within themselves so that their innova-
tive power is limited as well as facilitated not just by external but also
internal structures.

Through the habitus, the structure of which it is the product governs prac-
tice, not along the paths of a mechanical determinism, but within the con-
straints and limits initially set on its inventions… Because the habitus is an
infinite capacity for generating products—thoughts, perceptions, expres-
sions and actions—whose limits are set by the historically and socially situ-
ated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom
it provides is as remote from creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from
simple mechanical reproduction of the original conditioning.
(Bourdieu 1990: 55)
 5  THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY: MARX MEETS BOURDIEU  115

Just as moves in a game are improvisations limited by and, thereby,

reproducing the rules of the game, so is habitus the generative principle of
practices that are innovative but only within limits defined by the social
structures they reproduce. Bourdieu often uses the game metaphor to
illustrate the spontaneous and unthinking responses of players. He is
thinking of tennis or rugby where players develop a sense of the game and
there’s no time to reflect, but of course there are games like American
football where reflection plays its part or games like chess where it is key.
Still, the point stands, habitus is the development of skills to improvise
within limits defined by the rules. The social order inscribes itself in the
largely unconscious habitus though regularized participation in successive
social structures. The development of habitus proceeds in phases with
each phase the basis of subsequent formations. Thus, the primary habitus
formed in childhood through parenting lays the foundation for the sec-
ondary habitus formed in school, which, in turn, lays the foundations for
a tertiary habitus formed at work, so that habitus is subject to continual
revision but within limits defined by its past, largely repressed and
unconscious.6
Armed with habitus Bourdieu’s individual has much greater weight and
depth than Marx’s individual who is the effect and support of the social
relations into which they enter. For Bourdieu social relations become
lodged in a durable, transposable and irreversible habitus which has an
autonomous effect through participation in different social structures.
Marx, on the other hand, gives priority to social relations that impose
themselves on individuals as “indispensable and independent of their will”
without leaving any permanent psychic trace. Capitalist relations impose
themselves on individuals inexorably, irrespective of their experience in
different institutions in society. Marx does not consider the effects of
schools or family on the way people work or invest—he is solely interested
in the logic of social relations independent of the distinctive features of
individuals who support them. Bourdieu, by contrast, makes spheres
beyond the economy key to understanding a given social order and here

6
 There is a curious parallel between Bourdieu’s conception of “habitus” and Marx’s con-
ception of “forces of production.” Both are durable, transposable and irreversible—the one
a measure of the development of the individual, the other of society. Both come into conflict
with wider structures within which they develop. For Marx, however, the structures (rela-
tions of production) ultimately give way to the expansion of the forces of production,
whereas for Bourdieu, it is the opposite, habitus tends to give way to structures.
116  M. BURAWOY

lies both the secret of continuity and social change, or social change
through continuity.
Habitus is durable; it has a tendency to persist when it confronts new
social structures, a phenomenon he calls “hysteresis.” The resulting clash
between habitus and structure can come about in many ways. First, it
arises from the mobility of individuals, who carry a habitus cultivated in
one set of structures and come up against the imperatives of another.
Students from lower classes who enter a middle-class school find it diffi-
cult to adapt and either withdraw or rebel. When Algerian peasants with a
traditional habitus migrate to an urban context, they suffer from anomie,
leading to resignation or revolt.
The disjuncture of structure and habitus can also come about through
the mobility of social structures. Bourdieu (1979) describes the imposi-
tion of a colonial order on a traditional Kabyle society, disrupting accepted
patterns of behaviour and leading to anti-colonial revolution. In that revo-
lution, however, Algerians develop a habitus, more in keeping with moder-
nity, a habitus that embraces nationalist aspirations, what Bourdieu calls
the “revolution in the revolution.” Or back in Southern France in the
Béarn where Bourdieu grew up, modernization of agriculture disinherit
the peasant farmer who can no longer find a marriage partner with whom
to produce the next generation of inheritors (Bourdieu 2008). The farmer
retreats into morose resignation while young women are no longer pre-
pared to put up with drudgery of rural life and they exit for the city—the
one exhibiting an enduring habitus unable to adapt, the other endowed
with a more flexible habitus generative of innovative response. The diver-
gent responses of men and women are captured in the “bachelors’ ball”
where the degradation of the inheritors expresses itself in bodily discom-
fort and embarrassment as they ring the dance floor, watching the young
women freely dancing with men from the town.
Bourdieu’s most often-cited example of hysteresis is the devaluation of
educational credentials that, in his view, explains the student protest of
May 1968. In Homo Academicus, Bourdieu (1988) describes how the
expansion of higher education created an oversupply of assistant lecturers
whose upward mobility was consequently blocked. The ensuing tension
between aspirations and opportunities affected not only the young assis-
tants but students more generally, who found that their degrees did not
translate into expected jobs. The discordance between class habitus and
the labour market appeared simultaneously in a number of fields so that
their normally disparate temporal rhythms merged into a general crisis
 5  THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY: MARX MEETS BOURDIEU  117

conducted in a singular public time and producing an historical drama that

suspended common sense. In this view we might say that history is succes-
sion of unanticipated “conjunctures,” unpredictable clashes that punctu-
ate equilibria.
Bourdieu’s account of the dynamics of higher education is analogous to
Marx’s account of the expansion of capitalism through competition among
capitalists inherently leading to the degradation of the working class, with
two provisos. First, where Bourdieu has to take the expansion of educa-
tion as an unexplained given, an exogenous variable, Marx shows how the
internal dynamics of capitalism leads to the immiseration of the working
class and the concentration of capital. He has a theory of the rise and fall
of capitalism. Second, where Bourdieu explains student revolt in terms of
the mismatch of expectation and opportunity, disposition and position,
Marx stresses the formation of a working class as a response to changing
social relations.
The fact that people move among a plurality of structures implies the
ever-present possibility of social change. But this is not a theory of social
change which would require a far deeper understanding of the durability
of the habitus—how it develops, how new layers of the habitus affect exist-
ing layers, leading to a dynamic psychology. But equally, it would require
a theory of the resilience of social structures in the face of collective chal-
lenge from an unwavering habitus. In other words we need to theorize the
consequences as well as the origins of the inevitable clashes between habi-
tus and structure: when it leads to rebellion or revolution, when it leads to
resignation or innovation, when it leads to exit or voice. Change is ubiq-
uitous but why and how is very unclear.
While the idea of habitus can be deployed to interpret social change and
social protest, its main purpose is to explain continuity and underline how
difficult social change is to accomplish. Like the French Marxism of the
1960s and 1970s—Althusser, Balibar, Godeslier, Poulantzas with whom
he shares so much, leading him to stage exaggerated critiques—Bourdieu’s
functionalism was not necessarily an expression of conservatism that all is
well in society but an attempt to understand the resilience of social struc-
tures in the face of contestation, which brings us to the heart of his the-
ory—symbolic domination.
118  M. BURAWOY

Symbolic Domination: From Mystification

to Misrecognition

Bourdieu developed a set of generative concepts—habitus, capital and

field—but without a theory of history, totality or even agency. What he
does have, however, is a theory of symbolic domination. Once again we
would do well to begin with Marx and Engels who famously write of the
way ideology is both appealing and obscuring.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class
which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling
intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at
its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental produc-
tion, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means
of mental production are subject to it. (Tucker 1978: 172; emphasis added)

Having broken with ideology in order to make material relations the

foundation of history, here Marx and Engels temporarily break back to
ideology, namely, to the power of illusory ideas in sustaining the domina-
tion of the dominant class. We should note that, like Bourdieu, Marx and
Engels privilege intellectuals in the production of representations of
society.
There is ambiguity, however, in the meaning to be imputed to Marx
and Engels’s notion of ideological subjugation. What does it mean to
“subject” the dominated to the ideas of the ruling class? Bourdieu elabo-
rates Marx and Engels’s ideological subjection as follows:

Symbolic violence is the coercion which is set up only through the consent
that the dominated cannot fail to give to the dominator (and therefore to
the domination) when their understanding of the situation and relation can
only use instruments of knowledge that they have in common with the
dominator, which, being merely the incorporated form of the structure of
the relation of domination, make this relation appear as natural; or, in other
words, when the schemes they implement in order to perceive and evaluate
themselves or to perceive and evaluate the dominators (high/low, male/
female, white/black, etc.) are the product of the incorporation of the (thus
neutralized) classifications of which their social being is the product.
(Bourdieu 2000: 170)
 5  THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY: MARX MEETS BOURDIEU  119

Bourdieu’s symbolic violence is irreversible and irrevocable. Subjugation

inhabits the habitus, deep and unconscious. Bourdieu invokes the notion
of “misrecognition” to convey the depth of subjugation. There is a recog-
nition but it is false inasmuch as it is based on the repression of the condi-
tions of its production. We are like fish in water unable to recognize the
classifications we take for granted as the basis of an arbitrary domination.
Marx takes the idea of subjugation to ruling ideas in a different direc-
tion, arguing that the effectiveness of ruling ideology depends on their
resonance with lived experience of economic relations. Instead of mis-
recognition with its implied depth psychology, Marx writes of mystifica-
tion that affects anyone who enters capitalist relations. It is an attribute of
relations rather than the individual habitus. Thus, under capitalism,
exploitation is not experienced as such because it is hidden by the very
character of production, which obscures the distinction between necessary
and surplus labour, since workers appear to be paid for the entire work day.
Similarly, participation in market exchange leads to “commodity fetish-
ism,” whereby objects, which are bought and sold, are disconnected from
their production—the social relations and human labour necessary to pro-
duce them. Again, capitalist relations of production are obscured not
through an incorporated habitus but through the relations of exchange.
For Marx, however, such mystification is dissolved through class strug-
gle, leading the working class to see the truth of capitalism, on the one
hand, and their role in transforming it, on the other:

It is not a matter of what this or that proletarian or even the proletariat as a

whole pictures at present as its goal. It is a matter of what the proletariat is in
actuality, and what in accordance with this being, it will historically be com-
pelled to do. Its goal and its historical action are prefigured in the most clear
and ineluctable way in its own life-situation as well as in the whole organiza-
tion of contemporary bourgeois society. There is no need to harp on the fact
that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of
its historic task and is continually working to bring this consciousness to full
clarity. (Tucker 1978: 134–35)

However, as Bourdieu insists, for the proletariat to rid itself of the “the
muck of ages,” as Marx and Engels put it in The Germany Ideology (1978:
193), is not easy. Only under unusual circumstances—and to some extent
they pertained in nineteenth-century Europe—does class struggle assume
an ascendant path, intensifying itself as it expands, demystifying relations
120  M. BURAWOY

of exploitation as described in The Manifesto of the Communist Party.

There Marx and Engels support their claim by reference to class formation
in nineteenth-century England—from scattered struggles to the advance
of trade unions and finally to the formation of a national party that would
seize state power. In Class Struggles in France Marx argues that the exten-
sion of suffrage would unchain class struggle, although Engels some 50
years later and 50 years wiser would be more cautious in proclaiming the
immanent victory of the German working class.
This period of history corresponds to Bourdieu’s positive assessment of
Marxism when it realized its potential in the social world. But subse-
quently through its victories, through the concessions, the working class
wins, its revolutionary temper is domesticated and its struggles come to be
organized, increasingly within the framework of capitalism. From then on
Bourdieu can say that the symbolic violence incorporated in the lived
experience prevails over the cathartic effect of struggle.
Having tarred the whole Marxist tradition with Marx’s revolutionary
optimism, labelling it a scholastic illusion, Bourdieu then bends the stick
in the opposite direction:

And another effect of the scholastic illusion is seen when people describe
resistance to domination in the language of consciousness—as does the
whole Marxist tradition and also the feminist theorists who, giving way to
habits of thought, expect political liberation to come from the ‘raising of
consciousness’—ignoring the extraordinary inertia which results from the
inscription of social structures in bodies, for lack of a dispositional theory of
practices. While making things explicit can help, only a thoroughgoing pro-
cess of countertraining, involving repeated exercises, can, like an athlete’s
training, durably transform habitus. (Bourdieu 2000: 172)

What this “countertraining” might look like is never elaborated but it

has to dislodge the internalized and embodied habitus. Whether class
struggle might be a form of “countertraining” is especially unclear as
Bourdieu never entertains the idea of class struggle or even allows for
“collective resistance” to the dominant culture. The working classes are
driven by the exigencies of material necessity, leading them to make a vir-
tue out of a necessity. They embrace their functional lifestyle rather than
reject the dominant culture. An alternative culture remains beyond their
 5  THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY: MARX MEETS BOURDIEU  121

grasp, because they have neither the tools nor the leisure to create it
(Bourdieu 1984: chap. 7).7
Still, Bourdieu does say that “making things explicit,” that is, critical
reflection, can help. Yet we know little about the relationship between the
conscious and the unconscious. Can critical reflection change the habitus
and if so how? There is no theory of habitus to even make sense of the
question. Indeed, Bourdieu sometimes seem to banish the very vocabu-
lary of consciousness and with it the idea of ideology:

In the notion of ‘false consciousness’ which some Marxists invoke to explain

the effect of symbolic domination, it is the word ‘consciousness’ which is
excessive; and to speak of ‘ideology’ is to place in the order of representa-
tions, capable of being transformed by the intellectual conversion that is
called the ‘awakening of consciousness’, what belongs to the order of beliefs,
that is, at the deepest level of bodily dispositions. (Bourdieu 2000: 177)

Here Bourdieu misconstrues Marx who tries to grapple with the rela-
tionship between ideology as representation and ideology as belief—rep-
resentations are only effective insofar as they resonate with beliefs. The
issue between Marx and Bourdieu is not the distinction between ideology
and bodily knowledge but the character of beliefs themselves, whether
they are immanent to particular social relations or whether they inhabit
the habitus, the cumulative effect of embodied history.
Having written off the working classes as incapable of grasping the con-
ditions of their oppression, Bourdieu is compelled to look elsewhere for
ways of contesting symbolic domination. Having broken from scholastic
reason to the logic of practice and having discovered that the logic of prac-
tice is impervious to truth, he breaks back to the logic of theory, this time

7
 In writing about Algeria, however, Bourdieu (1979: 62–63) argues that it is the relative
stability and the “privilege” of experiencing “permanent, rational exploitation” that gives the
working class revolutionary potential, very different from the dispossessed peasantry and
subproletariat who live from hand to mouth and are, therefore, unable to plan for an alterna-
tive future. It is the distinction between a genuine “revolutionary force” and a spontaneous
“force for revolution.” This is a very different portrait that the one of the French working
class weighed down by necessity, accepting the legitimacy of the dominant classes. While
Bourdieu makes no effort to reconcile these opposed visions of the working class, he might
argue that it revolves around the symbolic violence in France and the physical violence of
colonialism. Alternatively, these may be strategic positions taken up in two different political
fields: against the FLN who favoured the peasantry as a revolutionary class in Algeria, and
against the Marxists who regarded the working class as inherently revolutionary in France.
122  M. BURAWOY

to the emancipatory science of sociology and to symbolic struggles within

the dominant class. Let us follow his argument.

From Class Struggle to Classification Struggle

While Marx does, indeed, endow the working with a historic mission of
securing emancipation for all, it is also true that he pays as much, if not
more, historical attention to the driving force of capitalism, namely, the
dominant class and its fractions. His crowning achievement—the theory
of capitalism in Capital—focuses on the economic activities of dominant
class, the competition and interdependence among capitalists, as well as
their creative destruction. When writing of politics in mid-nineteenth-­
century France, he dissects the relationship among different elites; when
writing of the factory acts in England, he recognizes the different interests
of fractions of capital as well as the landed classes; and when writing of
colonialism, it is the interests of the bourgeoisie that concern him. His
correspondence about politics was almost solely devoted to the strategies
of different national ruling classes and their states. Throughout he was
acutely aware of the relationship between bourgeoisie and its ideologists.
As he and Engels write in The German Ideology

The division of labour … manifests itself also in the ruling class as the divi-
sion of mental and manual labour, so that inside this class one part appears
as thinkers of the class (its active conceptive ideologists, who make the per-
fecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of liveli-
hood), while the others’ attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive
and receptive, because they are in reality the active members of the class and
have less time to make up the illusions and ideas about themselves. Within
this class this cleavage can even develop into a certain opposition and hostil-
ity between the two parts. (Tucker 1978: 173)

Here Marx and Engels prefigure Bourdieu’s division of the dominant

class into those high in economic capital (and lower in cultural capital) and
those high in cultural capital (and lower in economic capital). Bourdieu,
too, recognizes the conflict between these two fractions, but casts that
conflict in terms of struggles over categories of representation—so-called
classification struggles.
The classifications generated through struggles within the dominant
class between its dominant and dominated fractions shape the way of life
 5  THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY: MARX MEETS BOURDIEU  123

of different classes. Distinction works with a simple Marxian schema of

class: dominant class, petty bourgeoisie and working class. Each class has a
distinctive set of patterns of consumption: the working class is driven by
necessity, extending legitimacy to the dominant class’s sense of taste even
if it appears remote; the petty bourgeoisie, depending on the fraction,
seeks to become part of the grande bourgeoisie by adopting its standards
and imitating the latter’s style of life; the dominant class is located in dif-
ferent fields within which they compete to impose their vision and division
on society.
This is a sophisticated elaboration of Marx’s idea of the ruling ideology
being the ideology of the ruling classes in which a system of classifications
creates standards through which individuals from different classes evaluate
themselves. The taste of the dominant class is seen as an attribute of the
innate refinement rather than a function of a habitus, cultivated through
the attributes of domination, including access to wealth and leisure, just as
the dominated classes regard their own culture as a product of their own
inferiority rather than a force of necessity. The result is a belief in the legiti-
macy of the hierarchy of tastes resulting in their enactment that obscures
their class conditioning.
Active participation in patterns of life—the food we eat, the music we
listen to, the films we watch, the sports we play, the photographs we take
and so on—draw us into a hierarchy of legitimate consumption that
obscures the underlying class determinants. The same goes for education
which by virtue of its relative autonomy appears as neutral vis-à-vis class
drawing students from dominated classes into the pursuit of performance
that would lead to upward mobility (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977).
Failure to excel is blamed on inadequacies of the self rather than the class
character of the school which privileges those with cultural capital.
Education has, therefore, two functions: a technical function of slotting
people into the labour market and a social function of masking the class
determinants of educational outcomes. In State Nobility Bourdieu (1996b)
describes the struggles within the dominant class that determines the rela-
tive importance of educational credentials as well as the structure of access
to and content of education, thereby ensuring the misrecognition of class
domination.
Having closed off the dominated as a source of social change, Bourdieu
nevertheless regards the classification struggles within the dominant class
as potential instigators of “symbolic” revolutions capable of shaking the
“deepest structures of the social order”:
124  M. BURAWOY

Likewise, the arts and literature can no doubt offer the dominant agents
some very powerful instruments of legitimation, either directly, through the
celebration they confer, or indirectly, especially through the cult they enjoy,
which also consecrates its celebrants. But it can also happen that artists or
writers are, directly or indirectly, at the origin of large-scale symbolic revolu-
tions (like the bohemian lifestyle in the nineteenth century, or, nowadays,
the subversive provocations of the feminist or homosexual movements),
capable of shaking the deepest structures of the social order, such as family
structures, through transformation of the fundamental principles of division
of the vision of the world (such as male/female opposition) and the corre-
sponding challenges to the self-evidences of common sense. (Bourdieu
2000: 105)

How does this “shaking” affect the sturdy structures of society let alone
threaten the symbolic domination of the dominant class? At one point he
acknowledges the possibility that authors of such symbolic revolutions,
through the transfer of cultural capital and in certain moments, can insti-
gate subversive action from the dominated.

The symbolic work needed in order to break out of the silent self-evidence
of doxa and to state and denounce the arbitrariness that it conceals presup-
poses instruments of expression and criticism which, like other forms of
capital, are unequally distributed. As a consequence, there is every reason to
think that it would not be possible without the intervention of professional
practitioners of the working of making explicit, who, in certain historical
conjunctures, may make themselves the spokespersons of the dominated on
the basis of partial solidarities and de facto alliances springing from the
homology between a dominated position in this or that field of cultural
production and the position of the dominated in the social space. A solidar-
ity of this kind, which is not without ambiguity, can bring about …. the
transfer of cultural capital which enables the dominated to achieve collec-
tive mobilization and subversive action against the established order; with,
in return, the risk of hijacking which is contained in the imperfect corre-
spondence between the interests of the dominated and those of the
dominated-­ dominant who makes themselves the spokespersons of their
demands or their revolts, on the basis of a partial analogy between different
experiences of domination. (Bourdieu 2000: 188. Italics in the original)

This is one of the rare places where Bourdieu allows for the possibility
of collective mobilization of the dominated through recognition rather
than misrecognition of domination. Still the initiatives always come from
 5  THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY: MARX MEETS BOURDIEU  125

above, from the dominated fractions of the dominant class whose experi-
ence of domination allows for a tendentious alliance with the dominated
classes.
More typically, Bourdieu relies on the inner logic of fields to move
society towards a greater universalism, what he calls the realpolitik of rea-
son that is wired into the character of the state:

Those who, like Marx, reverse the official image that the State bureaucracy
seeks to give of itself and describe the bureaucrats as usurpers of the univer-
sal, acting like private proprietors of public resources, are not wrong. But
they ignore the very real effects of the obligatory reference to the values of
neutrality and disinterested devotion to the public good which becomes
more and more incumbent on state functionaries in the successive stages of
the long labor of symbolic construction which leads to the invention and
imposition of the official representation of the State as the site of universality
and the service of the general interest. (Bourdieu 2000: 124)

In this remarkable passage, written at the very time he is attacking the

French state for continuing to violate its public function, in which the
right hand of the state is displacing the left hand, when the state is openly
assaulting the working class, Bourdieu is also appealing to its “disinter-
ested devotion to the public good” that will eventually assert itself against
the state’s usurpers. In the long run, therefore, the state will become the
carrier of the general interest, but how?
The idea of universality will not prevail simply because it is an attractive
ideal—that would be the worst form of idealism—but because there are
certain fields that by their very functioning, by virtue of their internal
struggles, give rise to a commitment to the universal:

In reality, if one is not, at best, to indulge in an irresponsible utopianism,

which often has no other effect than to procure the short-lived euphoria of
humanist hopes, almost always as brief as adolescence, and which produces
effects quite as malign in the life of research as in political life, it is necessary
I think to return to a ‘realistic’ vision of the universes in which the universal
is generated. To be content, as one might be tempted, with giving the uni-
versal the status of a ‘regulatory idea’, capable of suggesting principles of
action, would be to forget that there are universes in which it becomes a
‘constitutive’ immanent principle of regulation, such as the scientific field,
and to a lesser extent the bureaucratic field and the judicial field; and that,
more generally, as soon as the principles claiming universal validity (those of
126  M. BURAWOY

democracy, for example) are stated and officially professed, there is no lon-
ger any social situation in which they cannot serve at least as symbolic weap-
ons in struggles of interests or as instruments of critique for those who have
a self-interest in truth and virtue (like, nowadays, all those, especially in the
minor state nobility, whose interests are bound up with universal advances
associated with the State and with law). (Bourdieu 2000: 127)

Let us recall that Bourdieu sets out on his journey with a critique of
scholastic reason that misses the ways in which theoretical models, such as
those of “rational choice” or “deliberative democracy,” are but projections
of the very specific conditions under which knowledge is produced. After
turning from this fallacious logic of theory to the logic of practice and
finding there only misrecognition, Bourdieu returns to the same univer-
salities produced in the scientific, legal and bureaucratic fields, universali-
ties that he had earlier called into question as scholastic fallacies—the
product of the peculiar circumstances of their production. But now he
turns to them as the source of hope for humanity.
We are back with the Enlightenment, with Hegel’s view of the state, so
trenchantly criticized not just by Marx but by Bourdieu who defines the
state as having the monopoly of symbolic as well as material violence. The
state is Janus faced, on one side masking the interests of the dominant
class as the general interest, but thereby setting in motion an imminent
critique, demanding that the state live up to its claims. We can see a similar
Enlightenment faith in Bourdieu’s proposals for an International of
Intellectuals—the organic intellectual of humanity—recognizing that they
are a corporate body with their own interests, but regarding those inter-
ests as the carriers of universalism and, thus, forming a corporatism of the
universal.8
Towards the end of his life Bourdieu was not only organizing intellec-
tuals but was also to be found on the picket lines of striking workers,
haranguing them about the evils of neoliberalism—even as he claimed
they could not understand the conditions of their own oppression. No
different from the people he criticized, he too succumbed to a gap between
his theory and his practice, especially when his theory led him into a politi-
cal cul-de-sac.

8
 They are what Alvin Gouldner (1979) calls a flawed universal class, only he was more
realistic about the corporatism of intellectuals. Antonio Gramsci would see Bourdieu’s intel-
lectuals as a traditional, and the defence of their autonomy as serving their role in presenting
the interests of the dominant class as the interests of all, as the universal interests.
 5  THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY: MARX MEETS BOURDIEU  127

Conclusion
Marx and Bourdieu set out from similar positions, but they end up in
divergent places. They both start out as critics of intellectualist illusions or
scholastic fallacies that privilege the role of ideas in the making of history.
They both move to the logic of practice. Marx remains wedded to this
logic, seeing in it a future emancipation realized through working-class
revolution, but when the working class lets him down, he sets about dem-
onstrating the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Bourdieu, by contrast, sees
the logic of practice as deeply mired in domination inculcated in the habi-
tus. So he breaks from the logic of practice back to the practice of logic
and to a faith in reason, whether through symbolic revolutions organized
by intellectuals or via the immanent logic of the state. Just as Marx revealed
and relied on the inner contradictions of the economy, Bourdieu relied on
the inner contradictions of the symbolic order. If Bourdieu starts out as a
critic of philosophy and ends up as a Hegelian, believing in the universality
of reason, Marx also starts out as a critic of philosophy, but ends up with
material production, putting his faith in the universality of the working
class through its realization of communism. Each would criticize the other
as delusional.
We are on the horns of a dilemma: intellectuals without the subaltern
or the subaltern without intellectuals. Each recognizes the dilemma, and
in their practice each breaks with their theory. Bourdieu devotes the last
years of his life appealing to social movements, challenging the turn to
neoliberalism. However, for his theory to catch up with his practice,
Bourdieu needs a far better account of the dynamics of the habitus, the
way it changes and, in particular, how it can be reshaped by critical reflec-
tion—how the habitus of consent becomes a habitus of defiance. Without
such a move forward, we are left wondering how intellectuals can pene-
trate their own habitus, how they can escape symbolic domination. How
is the habitus of intellectuals different from the habitus of the dominated?
Bourdieu suffers from a duality: an optimistic faith in reason and critical
reflection on one side and a pessimistic account of durable bodily knowl-
edge unaware of itself. After distinguishing between the logic of theory
and the logic of practice, he needs to bring them into a dynamic relation.
Equally Marx, despairing of the working class that carries the burden of
revolution, throws himself into the world of theory and devotes himself to
demonstrating that capitalism must inherently destroy itself. Like the
Young Hegelians he criticizes, Marx battles with intellectuals as though
128  M. BURAWOY

the fate of the world depended on it. As Bourdieu says in the opening
epigraph, Marx failed to grasp the power of his own theory in moving
people, but, in the final analysis, Bourdieu equally failed to understand
how critical reflection or symbolic revolutions can have real effects.
It would take another Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, to transcend the sepa-
ration of theory and practice. In a world defined by cultural domination,
what he called hegemony, Gramsci develops a more balanced conception
of class struggle, organized on the terrain of dominant ideology. In so
doing he distinguishes between traditional intellectuals like Bourdieu,
protecting their autonomy in order to project themselves as carrying some
universal truth, and organic intellectuals like Marx who sought a closer
alliance with the dominated, elaborating their kernel of good sense,
obtained through the collective transformation of nature.

References
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Bidet, Jacques. 2008. Bourdieu and Historical Materialism. In Critical Companion
to Contemporary Marxism, ed. Jacques Bidet and Eustache Kouvélakis,
587–605. Leiden, NL: Brill.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1975. The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social
Conditions of the Progress of Reason. Social Science Information 14 (6): 19–47.
———. 1977 [1972]. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by R.  Nice.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1979 [1963]. Algeria, 1960. Translated by R.  Nice. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
———. 1984 [1979]. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.
Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1988 [1984]. Homo Academicus. Translated by P.  Collier. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
———. 1990 [1980]. The Logic of Practice. Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
———. 1991 [1984]. Social Space and the Genesis of ‘Classes’. In Language and
Symbolic Power, trans. G. Raymond and M. Adamson, 229–251. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1996a [1992]. Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field.
Translated S. Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 1996b [1989]. State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Translated
by L. C. Clough. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
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———. 1999 [1996]. On Television. Translated by P.P.  Ferguson. New  York:

New Press.
———. 2000 [1997]. Pascalian Meditations. Translated by R.  Nice. Stanford:
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———. 2005. The Social Structures of the Economy. Translated by C.  Turner.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
_______. 2008 [2002]. The Bachelors’ Ball. Translated by R.  Nice. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Desan, Mathieu Hikaru. 2013. Bourdieu, Marx, and Capital: A Critique of the
Extension Model. Sociological Theory 31 (4): 318–342.
Eyal, Gil. 2013. Spaces between Fields. In Bourdieu and Historical Analysis, ed.
Philip Gorski, 158–182. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Gouldner, Alvin. 1979. The Future of the Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class.
New York: Seabury Press.
Tucker, Robert C. (ed.) 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: Norton.
 CHAPTER 6

Marx/Bourdieu: Convergences
and Tensions, Between Critical Sociology
and Philosophy of Emancipation

Philippe Corcuff

Introduction: Towards a Renewed Hermeneutics

of Critical Texts

Dealing with the theoretical relations between the works of Karl Marx and
those of Pierre Bourdieu firstly means coming to grips with the question
of ideas and their routine treatment,1 at least if one wishes to avoid the
beaten tracks and therefore better control one’s own point of view.
For there are habits in the discussion of ideas, whether it be in the tra-
ditional history of ideas, the history of philosophy or activist history, with

1
 I thank Keith Dixon (who was active in the Marxist ranks and who collaborated with
Pierre Bourdieu in Association Raisons d’Agir) for his translation of this chapter, an example
of his generosity in friendship. The quotations from Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault are
translated from the French editions and the pagination of the books by Pierre Bourdieu,
Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière also refers to the French editions.

P. Corcuff (*)
Political Studies Institute of Lyon, Lyon, France
e-mail: philippe.corcuff@sciencespo-lyon.fr

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 131

Switzerland AG 2022
G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and
Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_6
132  P. CORCUFF

indeed some convergence between the academic universe and activist cir-
cles. Thus we can observe an evolutionist tendency which is well illus-
trated by the classical notion of influence. For Michel Foucault, this notion
involves the “thoughtless continuities by which the discourse one intends
to analyse is in fact organized beforehand” (Foucault 1969: 36). Moreover,
among these “thoughtless continuities” (like “tradition,” “works,”
“author,” etc.), “influence” is one of those that Foucault invites us to
abandon, because it “provides a support—too magical to be properly ana-
lysed—for the facts of transmission and communication” and it refers
“phenomena of resemblance and repetition to a process that looks like one
of causality (but lacks rigorous limits and theoretical definition)” (ivi: 32).
The evolutionist approach to ideas could reveal a twofold movement in
the relations between Marx and Bourdieu: Marx influencing Bourdieu
and Bourdieu developing Marx. This evolutionist logic could accentuate
its normative implications in a progressive direction with the presupposi-
tion of a progression from Marx to Bourdieu. Bourdieu himself hinted at
this by presenting his work as the integration/surpassing of the work of
Marx, Durkheim and Weber, in a dialectical reading of Hegelian inspiration.
A second major tendency in the more classical version of the history of
ideas is to take an “author” and their “works” as a single block with its
own coherence. This approach was also criticized by Foucault for laying
down a priori “readymade syntheses” (ivi: 32).2 The Foucauldian critique
consists in an invitation to be more aware of the composite nature of texts
which are gathered together under the name of an author and their works.
This does not mean necessarily abandoning the categories of “author” and
“works” nor denying the possible existence of relative or partial coheren-
cies: “Not to refuse them completely but to undermine their easy accep-
tance […] ; to define under what conditions and in view of what analyses
some are indeed legitimate” (ivi: 37).
Faced with these two traditional tendencies, we propose a redefined
hermeneutics which does not invalidate the heuristic dimension of the
most commonly employed hermeneutics but offers an alternative view-
point. In opposition to the evolutionist approach, we envisage several fig-
ures: Bourdieu will be seen as developing some insights of Marx; we will
pinpoint the shifting of some Marxian resources by sian sociology but also
the retreat operated by Bourdieu from certain elements of the Marxian
critique. This analysis of Marx and Bourdieu will not be seen in the light

2
 See also, as a further contribution to this critique, once again in 1969, the conference
entitled “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” (Foucault 2001).
 6  MARX/BOURDIEU: CONVERGENCES AND TENSIONS, BETWEEN CRITICAL…  133

of the socio-historic context of their intellectual production, as would

legitimately be the case in a historical sociology of ideas, but from a
present-­day perspective in the early twenty-first century. We will be relat-
ing our discussion to topical issues in order to cast some heuristic light on
them and seek for answers. These present-day issues do not come out of
the blue but will be examined at the crossroads between two academic
disciplines: sociology (in its critical dimension)3 and political philosophy
(situated within the galaxy of theories of emancipation).4 They will also be
filtered by the anarchist activism, outside academia, of the author of
this text.
Concerning the presupposition of coherency of authors and their
works, we propose on the contrary to dissociate the concepts and methods
from the works from which they are extracted. This is one possible trajec-
tory for greater intelligibility, outside the beaten tracks of academia and
political activism. This will enable us to rub together a flint borrowed from
Marx and a flint taken from Bourdieu and, in so doing, create, hopefully,
some unusual “sparks of knowledge.” This also enables us to move on
from analyses in terms of the proximity of—or tension between—Marx
and Bourdieu in general and to look more attentively at convergences and
tensions at a lower level. In order to do so we will therefore steer clear of
systematic reconstructions in terms of “Marxism” or “Bourdieusianism.”
We have chosen four fields for this exploratory and partial research. The
first one concerns the methodology of the social sciences, the second the
sociology of class, the third the question of praxis and the fourth the polit-
ical philosophy of emancipation. This comes in the wake of previous
research work on Marx (notably Corcuff 2012b) and on Bourdieu (among
others, Corcuff 2003).

First Field: The Methodology of the Social Sciences

Marx can be considered to have been one of the pioneers in formulating a
methodological framework for the social sciences, at a time when these
latter were only just emerging and had not yet become autonomous in
relation to philosophy, and the logic of sociological enquiry did not yet
clearly represent one of their two foundational elements alongside theo-
retical logic. Bourdieu was one of those who helped to stabilize the

3
 On the concept of critical sociology which underlies the analyses presented in this text,
see Corcuff (2012a).
4
 On the political philosophy of emancipation used here, see Corcuff (2015).
134  P. CORCUFF

methodological framework of autonomous social sciences based on a to-

and-fro movement between the theoretical and empirical spheres.
An unfortunately little-read text by Marx attempts to clarify the links
between the theoretical and empirical components of socio-historical
knowledge through the method of “thought derived from the concrete.”
This text is the Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy of 1857 (Marx 1971). The text itself and more particularly the
passage entitled “The Method of Political Economy” can be read as an
attempt to identify the twofold dangers of empiricism and theoreticism. It
is firstly the empiricism of facts believed to emerge spontaneously outside
any theoretical construction that comes under scrutiny:

It would seem to be the proper thing to start with the real and concrete ele-
ments, with the actual preconditions, e.g., to start in the sphere of economy
with population, which forms the basis and the subject of the whole social
process of production. Closer consideration shows, however, that this is
wrong. Population is an abstraction if, for instance, one disregards the
classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn remain empty terms if
one does not know the factors on which they depend, e.g., wage-labour,
capital, and so on. (ibid.)

Unanalysed concrete facts thus carry abstractions which mislead the

onlooker into over-simplification. Only conceptual assistance makes it
possible to translate concrete facts into the logic of scientific intelligibility.
Thus, paradoxically, it is through conceptual abstraction that we can free
ourselves from the false evidence of empirical abstraction. Concerning the
discovery, through analysis, “of a few decisive abstract, general relations,
such as division of labour, money, and value” (ibid.) Marx continues:

When these separate factors were more or less clearly deduced and estab-
lished, economic systems were evolved which from simple concepts, such as
labour, division of labour, demand, exchange-value, advanced to categories
like State, international exchange and world market. The latter is obviously
the correct scientific method. (ibid.)

Concrete facts do not give up their secrets automatically. Thus,

Marx adds:

The concrete concept is concrete because it is a synthesis of many defini-

tions, thus representing the unity of diverse aspects. It appears therefore in
reasoning as a summing-up, a result, and not as the starting point. (ibid.)
6  MARX/BOURDIEU: CONVERGENCES AND TENSIONS, BETWEEN CRITICAL…  135

Thus the explanation of what might be called the method of “thought

derived from the concrete”:

Whereas the method of advancing from the abstract to the concrete is sim-
ply the way in which thinking assimilates the concrete and reproduces it as a
concrete mental category. (ibid.)

There is an echo of this in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, in a context in

which the social sciences had now been fully constituted and in a process
of consolidation. Firstly, a long extract from Marx’s 1857 text is repro-
duced in Le Métier de sociologue, co-authored with Jean-Claude
Chamboredon and Jean-Claude Passeron (Bourdieu et  al. 1983:
193–195). Moreover, the first methodological rule given in Le Métier de
sociologue could be seen as a synthetic reformulation of the analysis we
have just discussed:

The fact is conquered against the illusion of immediate knowledge. (ivi: 28)

For “concrete facts” do not speak for themselves, contrary to the claims
of empiricism:

We must not forget that the real is never on the initiative, as it can only reply
if it is questioned. (ivi: 54)

Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron thus take Marx one step for-
ward, notably by insisting on the critique of language:

If common language is not […] submitted to a methodological critique,

then the risk is that we will take as data objects that have in fact been pre-­
constituted in and by common language. (ivi: 37)

Moreover, to free ourselves from empiricism without abandoning the

empirical, the three sociologists argue for a reformulation, beyond the
Marxian lexicon, of the use of concepts. They should be seen “as tools
which, when taken out of their original context, can be put to other uses”
(ivi: 15).
This results in “a definition of the scientific approach as a dialogue
between hypothesis and experience” or the “dialectic between theory and
verification” (ivi: 87). However, like Marx—although not exactly in the
same form, a point to which we will return later—they insist on the pri-
macy of the theoretical.
136  P. CORCUFF

However, the critique of empiricism would be incomplete without the

critique of a symmetrical pitfall, that of theoreticism. Marx calls it into
question with regard to Hegel:

Hegel accordingly conceived the illusory idea that the real world is the result
of thinking which causes its own synthesis, its own deepening and its own
movement. (Marx 1971)

Thus Marx questions the approach that takes the real as “a product of
the idea which evolves spontaneously and whose thinking proceeds out-
side and above perception and imagination,” in the name of a scientific
method which makes it “the result of the assimilation and transformation
of perceptions and images into concepts” (ibid.).
Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron similarly warn of the dangers of
“pure theorists” (1983: 23). This is the theoreticist temptation that
Bourdieu will later uncover in his analysis of the Marxism of Etienne
Balibar: “the claim to deduce the event from the essence, the historical
given from the theoretical model” (Bourdieu 2001d: 395).
Implicitly, the Marxian model of thought derived from the concrete
offers the possibility of a critique of the realist fetishization of concepts,
that is, the belief that concepts exist in reality, that there is a sort of merger
between the concept and the real. However, the concept is not the real but
rather offers a means of rendering the real intelligible, reproducing it “as
a concrete mental category.” This realist fetishization of concepts, which
is one of the paths leading to the dogmatization of theory, can be seen to
operate in Marxists’ uses of Marx. This is at least the case for those who
believe that “capitalism” and “class” actually exist, whereas they are in fact
“concrete mental categories” which provide a theoretical account of the
real. Bourdieu is himself explicitly critical of the risk of a realist fetishizing
of concepts: this is what he calls “the realism of the intelligible” or “the
reification of concepts” (Bourdieu 2001c: 297). He adopts a similar,
reflexive, stance concerning his own concepts, for example, habitus, which
he says “is of value perhaps above all for the false problems and false solu-
tions it eliminates, for the questions that it makes it possible to better
articulate or resolve, and the properly so-called scientific issues it reveals”
(Bourdieu 1980a: 89, note 2).
However, at the same time, the formulations of Marx of 1857 do seem
more flexible, open and dynamic—and therefore of more heuristic value,
in some ways, for present-day research in the social sciences—than those
6  MARX/BOURDIEU: CONVERGENCES AND TENSIONS, BETWEEN CRITICAL…  137

employed in Le Métier de sociologue, concerning the relations between the

theoretical and the empirical. In several instances Marx insists that the real
is to some extent a starting point in the thought derived from the con-
crete: “the real and concrete elements” are seen as “the actual precondi-
tions,” or “the real point of origin, and thus the point of origin of
perception and imagination” (Marx 1971). This is why “the subject, soci-
ety, must always be envisaged therefore as the pre-condition of compre-
hension even when the theoretical method is employed” (ibid.).
The starting point could therefore be seen to be the theoretical dimen-
sion, thus the expression “the theoretical method,” and the real seen as “a
result,” but the link with the real is “the real point of origin.” The theo-
retical dimension would therefore be first in chronological order, but at
the same time comes under the control of the empirical dimension that
the investigations must deal with, these investigations being in their turn
framed by the theory. Here we have a productive tension, both irreducible
and infinite, between two poles. This is more reminiscent of the primacy
granted to “antinomy” and “the balancing of contraries” which we find in
the work of the anarchist adversary of Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
(1997: 206), than of the privilege given to the “superseding” of contra-
dictions to be found in the Hegelian dialectic which was of course a major
source of inspiration for Marx.
In Le métier de sociologue there is a chronological anteriority and a logi-
cal superiority of the theoretical over the empirical, expressed in a “hierar-
chy of epistemological acts”: “The fact is conquered, constructed,
observed” (Bourdieu et al. 1983: 81). This tends to rigidify the method-
ological markers in a compulsory three-phase process, whatever the char-
acteristics of the empirical investigations or their practical circumstances,
rather than accepting a permanent tension with continual risks of imbal-
ance (either empiricist or theoreticist). The resolution of the tensions
between empirical enquiry and conceptualization tends here to give pre-
cedence to theoretical control. This at least is the case in the epistemologi-
cal model which Le métier de sociologue suggests can be transposed to all
sociological research work.
Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron most often develop and pro-
long Marx’s thinking, although he himself had only sketched out certain
possible orientations of a methodology of the social sciences. Marx is per-
haps a better methodological guide, thanks to certain formulations, and
more adaptable to the variety of research work in this field.
138  P. CORCUFF

Second Field: The Sociology of Class

The analyses of social classes in Marx’s writings vary in content, depending
on when the texts were written and which texts we examine. Only Marxist
reductionism could possibly postulate a unified theory of class in Marx’s
work. This is much less the case in the writing of Pierre Bourdieu, but
there are real shifts in his thinking. Here we will go in the opposite direc-
tion to our initial approach, from a discussion of Bourdieu in order to
arrive at Marx. Once again we will be discussing a specific aspect of
Bourdieu and Marx: texts from the late 1970s and early 1980s for
Bourdieu, embedded in what he later called “constructivist structuralism”
or “structuralist constructivism” (Bourdieu 1987: 147), and the widest
read book by Marx, which Friedrich Engels contributed to, The Manifesto
of the Communist Party of 1848.
The most routine forms of Marxism have suggested a tendentially
objectivist and economistic vision of social classes; the latter existing
“objectively” as they are situated in the “economic infrastructure” of soci-
ety. It was notably in opposition to this reading that the so-called con-
structivist approaches—in the sense of the model of “social and historical
construction of reality”—developed, including Bourdieu’s own work. In
Bourdieu’s case we are talking about a constructivism of social objectiva-
tion, that is, the exploration of historical processes of materialization and
stabilization of mechanisms and institutions through discursive and non-­
discursive practice, and not an idealist constructivism focusing solely on
representations and discourse.
Bourdieu began to look in this direction in the late 1970s and early
1980s, trying to escape from the burden of objectivism (in the sense that
objectivity is seen as a given) in his treatment of social class, via two types
of socio-historical reconstruction:

1. The importance of social classification struggles (les luttes des classe-

ments sociaux), that is, the battles waged around the definition of
classes, their delimitations, their respective positions in relation to
each other, and the place occupied by various individuals, which
represent one of the expressions of the class struggle—in what are
effectively class differences in a given society (Bourdieu 1979). This
is the symbolic component of class.
2. The contribution of political representation—the action of represen-
tatives, of spokespersons, speaking for the group in the public
sphere—to the existence of social groups (Bourdieu 2001a, 2001b).
This is the political component of class.
 6  MARX/BOURDIEU: CONVERGENCES AND TENSIONS, BETWEEN CRITICAL…  139

Bourdieu went on to take on board the major constructivist elements

provided by the important theoretical and empirical contribution of one
of his close associates at the time, Luc Boltanski, in his book entitled Les
cadres. La formation d’un groupe social (1982). Bourdieu developed, in
1984, a more systematic and original approach to social class around the
related notions of “probable classes” and “mobilized classes” by associat-
ing more clearly the level of classification struggles with that of political
representation (Bourdieu 2001c). The expression “probable classes” refers
to “groups of agents occupying similar positions who, in similar circum-
stances and submitted to similar conditioning, are likely to have similar
dispositions and interests, and therefore to develop similar practices” (ivi:
296–297). These classes only exist potentially, outlined by the critical the-
orist or sociologist “on paper” on the basis of a series of indicators.
Depending on the indicators that are chosen, there are several types of
possible class differentiation at a given moment. For example, in La dis-
tinction (1979), Bourdieu constructed a vision of French society in the
period from 1960 to 1970 taking into account both the volume of eco-
nomic capital and that of cultural capital, and criticizing Marxists for their
economistic emphasis on economic capital alone. And since there are
always several possible class constructions at a given moment in time, there
is nothing inevitable about the shift from “probable class” to “mobilized
class.” This plurality and this non-necessary probability clearly set apart
the Bourdieusian pair of “probable” and “mobilized” classes from the
Hegel-inspired contrast between “class in itself” (objective) and “class for
itself” (subjective) stressed by certain Marxists, in a voluntaristic logic
which is not that of the sociologist.5
The “probable” classes are not only in competition in the social sci-
ences: the various ways of representing what are seen to be meaningful
class differentiations are also mobilized in the public sphere of our societ-
ies, where academic criteria of classification may be used by various

5
 The pair “class in itself”/“class for itself” is of marginal importance in the work of Marx,
and appears only in six sentences of The Poverty of Philosophy, a polemical text written
against Proudhon and published in 1847: “Economic conditions had first transformed the
mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for
this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against
capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this
mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends
become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle.” [Marx
1955: Chapter Two-Part 5].
140  P. CORCUFF

categories of social protagonists—be they from the university system, pro-

fessional politicians, trade unionists, journalists, etc.—but together with
other, vaguer and more indeterminate, positions. Let us take two examples
of the political competition between different ways of differentiating class
in French society since the late 1970s:

1. Are there two main classes—wage-workers and capitalists—or three:

the class of the wealthy, the class of the poor and the “immense
middle class”?
2. Is French society divided into socio-economic classes (wage-earning
class/capitalist class) or does it split along the lines of nationals ver-
sus foreigners?

The “mobilized class” has common spokespersons, institutions and

visions of the world. It is a class that is objectivated by a twofold and inter-
linked political and symbolic process. This is largely collective, impersonal,
involuntary and unconscious.
What can we say about the Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx
and Engels 1888) in terms of a sociology of class informed by the con-
structivist critique of class objectivism expressed by Bourdieu? We can see
that two opposite threads are juxtaposed and intermingled here without
any theoretical consistency: an objectivist thread and a constructivist one.
The objectivist thread? Class dynamics appear to be carried by the eco-
nomic movement of society, independently of the practices and represen-
tations of those involved

But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in
number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses […] The various inter-
ests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and
more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of
labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. (ivi:
Chapter I)

What we have here is, so to speak, a mechanics of class which is essen-

tially seen from an objective standpoint. And if class relations do seem to
be constitutive of their movement, it is once again in an almost exclusively
objective form:
6  MARX/BOURDIEU: CONVERGENCES AND TENSIONS, BETWEEN CRITICAL…  141

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same pro-

portion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class of
labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only
so long as their labour increases capital. (ibid.)

A constructivist thread? The struggle seems logically prior—in class

struggle it is the struggle that makes it possible to define the classes—and
chronologically for the proletariat—“with its birth begins its struggle with
the bourgeoisie” (ibid.)—in the construction of class. The unification of
the class thus appears as a movement allowing a shift from local fragmenta-
tion to national linkage, that is, a move “to centralise the numerous local
struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between
classes” (ibid.). This quotation suggests that we can only properly talk of
“class struggle” at a certain level of national unification of the struggle. To
sum up, although proletarians may factually exist in a society, there is no
spontaneous construction of the proletariat as a class. And this national
struggle is above all a political one in the confrontation with the modern-­
day Nation-state. In this sense “every class struggle is a political struggle”
(ibid.).
However, there is a significant difference between the political and
symbolic construction of class in Bourdieu’s writing and the political con-
struction of class in Marx and Engels. The construction is above all volun-
taristic in the work of Marx and Engels, driven by a political will:

The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other pro-
letarian parties: the formation of the proletariat into a class. (ivi: Chapter II)

The process of social construction is largely involuntary in Bourdieu’s

view, as seen in the unforeseen effects of a variety of different wills, as well
as in the influence of the non-conscious or indeed the social unconscious
(habitus). We can advance the hypothesis that the mainly voluntaristic
dimension of Marx and Engels is consistent with the dominant tone of the
Manifesto of the Communist Party: this is an activist tone as it is, after all, a
political manifesto whose primary objective is to mobilize support.
In this second field Bourdieu has helped us retrospectively to clarify a
text written by Marx and Engels through a tension. This has revealed a
degree of convergence between the two approaches but also differences.
142  P. CORCUFF

Third Field: Practice, Between the Sociology

of Action and Revolutionary Politics

The question of practice will also constitute a point of intersection between

the writing of Marx and Bourdieu, with once again differences and ten-
sions. In the Theses on Feuerbach, written in 1845, Marx’s notion of praxis
was to influence his very conception of knowledge:

The main defect of all hitherto-existing materialism—that of Feuerbach

included—is that the Object, actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in
the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous
activity, practice (Praxis), not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active
side, in opposition to materialism, was developed by idealism—but only
abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as
such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, differentiated from thought-­
objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity.
(Marx 2002, First Thesis)

The oppositions between the objective and the subjective are tradi-
tional in the philosophies of knowledge and action, and are often associ-
ated with the polar opposites of materialism and idealism. Aware of the
shortcomings of both approaches, Marx tries to sidestep them. Both
materialist objectivism and idealist subjectivism are seen as blind alleys.
Materialist objectivism contemplates the world as if it were a motionless
object. It does have the advantage of taking “sensuousness” on board but
“not as human sensuous activity,” tending to eliminate any trace of subjec-
tivity. Idealist subjectivism takes an interest in subjectivities from the
standpoint of ideas. It has the advantage of developing “the active side”
but in an abstract, disembodied and intellectualist manner. According to
Marx, to shift away from these two poles, which are both unsatisfactory,
entails examining the matter that has been shaped practically by subjectivi-
ties in a social framework, therefore in a logic of social objectivation, that
is, the twofold movement of social creation of objects by subjectivities and
the construction of subjectivities through creative practice. Marx calls
“objective activity” these interactive social logics between subjects and
objects through the movement of practice. Thus a practical materialism or
an objectivating praxis emerges. This implies first and foremost a radical
modification of our relationship with our knowledge of the world.
Bourdieu will build on these initial insights of Marx in his own radi-
cal critique of objectivism, associated with intellectualism, in particular
 6  MARX/BOURDIEU: CONVERGENCES AND TENSIONS, BETWEEN CRITICAL…  143

in Le sens pratique (Bourdieu 1980a). As well as Marx, he will refer to

the work of the other major figures of the philosophical critique of
intellectualism, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maurice Merleau-
Ponty. The main take of Bourdieu on objectivist intellectualism is the
idea of a spectator seeing things from above and who therefore forgets
the logics and practical urgencies of what they are seeing, which is not
intended as a spectacle:

Objectivism constitutes the social world as a spectacle played out for an

observer who adopts a “point of view” on the action. He then imports into
the action the principles of his relationship with the object. He then believes
that it was solely intended for knowledge and as if all the interactions can be
reduced to symbolic exchanges. This is a point of view taken from the sum-
mit of the social structure where the world is seen in terms of representa-
tion—in the sense used by idealist philosophy, but also in painting and
theatre. Practices are only understood as theatre roles, executions of scores
or applications of plans. (Bourdieu 1980a: 87)

There is a projection onto the object of knowledge of intellectualist

prejudices unaware of the “practical sense”:

Intellectualism is inscribed in the fact of introducing into the object the

intellectual relationship with the object, substituting for the practical rela-
tionship for practice the observer’s relationship to the object. (ivi: 58)

This approach introduces errors into the sociological knowledge of

action by essentializing in fixed objects (for instance, “classes” for the
Marxist sociologist or “individuals” for liberal sociologists) what is in fact
processed in historically situated practices. It is as if, in order to analyse
what is happening on a football field, we gave special attention to the
account of a journalist who is commentating on the match, but forgetting
the game itself as it is being played on the ground, which cannot be said
to be a spectacle in which the players have constantly a comprehensive
overview.
In these two texts, both Marx and Bourdieu call into question the intel-
lectualist tendencies of scholarly knowledge when it claims to give an
account of reality impregnated with practical issues.6
6
 “Resuscitating the possibles, Marx, despite his vigorous cleansing, does not entirely
escape from traces of the scientific, historial and progressive religiosity, that was so character-
istic of his century,” admits the heretical Marxist philosopher, Daniel Bensaïd (1990: 153).
144  P. CORCUFF

From this point on, Bourdieu will paradoxically re-establish a certain

primacy of scholarly knowledge, in what might be called a “nostalgia for
totality” (Corcuff 2012a: 176–182). A superior form of sociological
knowledge, it is argued, emerges from a twofold break made possible by a
“participatory objectivation”: “a break with indigenous experience and
the indigenous representation of that experience” and then “through a
second break, calling into question the presuppositions inherent in the
position of the “objective” observer” (ibid.: 46).
The Theses on Feuerbach are not tempted by this form of scientistic arro-
gance. Let us not forget, however, that this is one of Marx’s texts in which
praxis is seen as primordial, whereas the rest of his work is often irrigated
by a tension between scientism and revolutionary action, as Pierre Dardot
and Christian Laval (2012) have shown. However, in the Theses, it is not
knowledge but practice which has the final word:

Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness of
his thinking, in practice. (Marx 2002, Second Thesis)

There is some room for knowledge as an understanding of practice, but

it is of secondary importance:

All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in
human practice and in the comprehension of this practice. (ivi: Eighth Thesis)

Hence the famous lines:

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the
point is to change it. (ivi: Eleventh Thesis)

Practice is infinitely open-ended and will not submit to the pretensions

of totality to which Marx still seems attached, in other ways, in this nine-
teenth century so heavily impregnated with scientism. In practice, there is
no final end. Thus, Merleau-Ponty noted, against Marxist dogmatisms,
that “the great revolutionaries, Marx in particular, know that universal
history is not to be contemplated but made.” From which he argues in
favour of a “keen intelligence of events.” This is why “the authentic revo-
lutionary, each day, faced with each new problem rediscovers what is to be
done , knowing that s/he has no map and no prior knowledge of where
exactly s/he is heading” (Merleau-Ponty 2000: 12).
6  MARX/BOURDIEU: CONVERGENCES AND TENSIONS, BETWEEN CRITICAL…  145

Final primacy of praxis aided by rational knowledge for the Marx of the
Theses on Feuerbach; final primacy of scholarly knowledge informed by
practice for the Bourdieu of Le sens pratique: this epistemological tension
is also a social tension between the activist and the scholar. Bourdieu helps
us to understand the gains in terms of knowledge that can be had from the
“practical relationship with practice.” Marx, however, warns of the dan-
gers of a scientific knowledge with such a wide grasp, insisting on its
incomplete coverage of practice.

Fourth Field: The Political Philosophy

of Emancipation

The first two fields we have explored are situated in the mainly analytical
logic of the social sciences (the analysis of what is or what has been). The
third field identified the intersections and tensions between the sociology
of action and the philosophy of revolutionary praxis. The fourth field
opens on to political philosophy, leaving greater space for a directly nor-
mative philosophy (reflection on what should be).
In Marx’s writing, the science-based critique of capitalism is clearly
associated with revolutionary class struggle, with a horizon of social eman-
cipation. Admittedly, as Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval have stressed
(2012), there are tensions throughout Marx’s work between the scientific
register, with scientistic temptations, and the register of emancipatory
(and even self-emancipatory) praxis, with voluntaristic temptations.
However, for Marx, as for many later Marxists, structural social critique
and emancipation go hand in hand, although there may be differences and
distortions from one text to another. It is something worth noting that, in
this early twenty-first century, the links have been weakened between
social critique and emancipation for a variety of reasons. In the academic
field this has been caused by ultra-specialization of scholarly work, a lack
of dialogue, sometimes erupting into conflict, between social sciences and
philosophy, the relative withdrawal of academics from social and political
debates with the exception of highly specialized expertise or a reductionist
and scientistic vision of necessary scientific distancing, through the corpo-
ratist and often poorly argued (epistemologically speaking) filter of “axi-
ological neutrality.” In society more generally this has resulted from the
collapse of the communist mythology born with the Bolshevik Revolution
of 1917 after the authoritarian and totalitarian experiences of the twenti-
eth century, the massive conversion of social democrats to economic
146  P. CORCUFF

neo-­liberalism, the blurring of the ideological and political markers defin-

ing the “left” and the “right,” as well as the rise in importance of ultra
conservative or even “post-fascist” groups operating between social cri-
tique, discrimination and nationalism.7 This is why it has become more
important today to recreate the links more clearly, in scholarly work as
well as in socio-political debate, between structural social critique and
emancipation.8
The linkage between emancipation and social critique is often present
in Marx’s writing although the characteristics of that emancipation are
hardly developed. The General Rules of the International Workingmen’s
Association, set up in 1864, which were written by Marx himself, give
some indications. Social emancipation is seen here as self-emancipation:
“the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the work-
ing classes themselves,” on the basis of equality, meaning “equal rights and
duties” within a perspective of “the abolition of all class rule” (Marx
1864). Emancipation from what? Three forms of servitude are designated:
“social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence,” of which
“the economical subjection of the man of labor to the monopolizer of the
means of labor […] lies at the bottom.” The ethical dimension is humanist
as emancipation addresses “all men, without regard to color, creed, or
nationality” (ibid.). This emancipation will be internationalist, supposing
“a fraternal bond of union between the working classes of different
countries.”
Within the General Rules of the International Workingmen’s Association,
emancipation is seen essentially as collective in nature. However, a series of
texts by Marx stress that the aim is to create the social conditions for an
emancipation of humans’ individuality.9 The individualist component of
Marx’s writing has most often been side-lined by Marxist readings, thus
7
 On the tendency to dissociate structural social critique and emancipation in the early
twenty-first century, facilitating the development of “post-fascist” uses of hypercritical con-
spiracy theories which provide justifications for xenophobic, sexist and homophobic discrimi-
nation in a nationalist theoretical framework, see my study of the French case (Corcuff 2021).
8
 With a view to re-associating structural social critique and emancipation, see the political
philosophy of Miguel Abensour (1939–2017), now sadly no longer with us; cf. the interest-
ing synthesis provided by Manuel Cervera-Marzal (2013). See also the sociological work of
Luc Boltanski (2009) and, on the crossroads between sociology and political philosophy, our
own exploration of these issues (Corcuff 2012a).
9
 From his youthful to his late writing, we provide a sample illustrating Marx’s major pre-
occupation with individuality in the second part of our Marx XXIe siècle, entitled “From the
wounded individual to the “total man”” (Corcuff 2012b: 59–98).
6  MARX/BOURDIEU: CONVERGENCES AND TENSIONS, BETWEEN CRITICAL…  147

contributing to the hegemony of a “collectivist software” in the working-­

class and socialist movement (Corcuff 2006, 2014). Thus, in The German
Ideology, co-authored with Engels in 1845–1846, communism, rapidly
sketched by the authors, takes on the colours of the liberation of poly-
phonic individualities:

in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but
each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates
the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing
today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon,
rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without
ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. (Marx and Engels
1968: Part I-A)

In another text, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, individual and

collective emancipation go together in the form of an association, the for-
mer being the pre-condition for the latter:

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms,
we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the
condition for the free development of all. (Marx and Engels 1888:
Chapter II)

The question of emancipation is of less importance in Bourdieu’s criti-

cal sociology than in Marx. It is in this sense that the tension between the
sociological critique of Bourdieu and the philosophy of emancipation in
the writing of Jacques Rancière provides an interesting angle to observe
the present-day dislocation between social critique and emancipation (see
Corcuff 2012a: chapters 1 and 2). Emancipation does not, however, alto-
gether disappear from the analysis of Bourdieu, who remains a man of the
Enlightenment, but it does remain peripheral in the successive formula-
tions of his theoretical approach. It emerges mainly in a form inspired by
Baruch Spinoza: the acquisition of a relative freedom through the under-
standing of social determinisms. This emancipation has both an individual
and a collective dimension. An individual level, for instance, in the preface
to Le sens pratique:

Sociology […] offers a possibility, perhaps the only one, of contributing, if

only through the awareness of determinations, to the construction of some-
thing like a subject, otherwise abandoned to the forces of the world.
(Bourdieu 1980a: 41)
148  P. CORCUFF

A collective level, for instance, in the post-scriptum to La misère

du monde:

What the social world has done can, armed with this knowledge, be undone.
(Bourdieu Ed. 1993: 944)

This led him to trace, at one point in time, a “rational utopianism

capable of making use of the knowledge of the probable in order to hasten
the emergence of the possible” (Bourdieu 1980b: 78).
Here we have an interesting contribution to an emancipatory logic, but
which has its limitations, and cannot be given the main role in the space of
emancipatory practices as Bourdieu tends to suggest. In this respect, cer-
tain criticisms of Jacques Rancière (1983: 239–288), if we tone down
their unilateral character, are on target. For this form of emancipation is
once again too much under the supervision of the scholar, modern-day
equivalent of Plato’s philosopher-king, who appears as an obstacle to self-­
emancipation. It is mainly scholarly resources that are emphasized by
Bourdieu in the process of emancipation. The move from Marx to
Bourdieu thus includes both progress and regression in terms of emanci-
pation, even if Marx’s scientistic leanings make him ambivalent in terms of
self-emancipation for Jacques Rancière (ivi: 87–184), but also clearly more
reluctant than Bourdieu to give precedence to scholarly knowledge.
It might be argued that the incomplete journey we have embarked on,
through zones of the continent Marx and other zones of the continent
Bourdieu, could enrich indirectly our sociological and political imagina-
tion here and now. That at least is our hope.

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 CHAPTER 7

Bourdieu on the State: Beyond Marx?

David L. Swartz

Pierre Bourdieu theorized the modern State relatively late in his highly
productive career in which he addressed a very broad range of topics. His
battery of concepts and methods for sociological analysis reflect an exten-
sive array of influences that he knitted together in remarkably original
ways. His thinking on the State is no exception. This chapter compares
Bourdieu to Karl Marx in thinking about the State.

Marx in the Background
Bourdieu does not work within just one of the classical sociological tradi-
tions but draws selectively and dialectically across the three main ones:
Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber, and in the case of the State,
Norbert Elias as well. Indeed, Bourdieu eschews association with any one
of the three classical theorists; he pursues a sort of “dialectical eclecticism”
in which he critically juxtaposes Marx, Weber, and Durkheim by high-
lighting what he views as their respective contributions and limitations for
the study of symbolic power (Bourdieu 1977, 1991; Bourdieu and

D. L. Swartz (*)
Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
e-mail: dswartz@bu.edu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 153

Switzerland AG 2022
G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and
Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_7
154  D. L. SWARTZ

Passeron 1977: 4–5). Regarding symbolic systems, Bourdieu draws from

Durkheim the idea that any social order requires logical and moral confor-
mity. From Marx comes the ideas that social order is conflictual and serves
principally dominant groups (Bourdieu 2014: 145). And from Weber
comes the idea that successful domination requires legitimation (Bourdieu
2014: 173). Regarding the State in particular, Bourdieu (2014: 201) sees
all three—Marx, Durkheim and Weber—sharing the view that there has
been a broad historical process in most societies—certainly in modern
ones—of increasing differentiation into separate autonomous spheres.
Whether it is Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation, Durkheim on the
division of labour, or Weber on the processes of rationalization, Bourdieu
(2014: 70–71) suggests that all three describe general processes that
­contribute to a global history of the State. But they also offer distinctive
contributions to understanding the modern State. Bourdieu (1990:
36) writes:

Against the illusion of the ‘state as arbitrator’ [our translation], Marx con-
structed the notion of the state as an instrument of domination. But, against
the disenchantment effected by the Marxist critique, you have to ask, with
Weber, how the state, being what it is, manages to impose the recognition
of its domination and whether it isn’t necessary to include in the model that
against which you constructed the model, namely the spontaneous repre-
sentation of the state as legitimate. (See also Bourdieu 2014: 149)

This broad synthesizing method has not been fully appreciated by cer-
tain critics of Bourdieu’s work. Some early British and American interpre-
tations of Bourdieu wrongly identify him as a Marxist (notably, Inglis
1979), but subsequent more in-depth analyses rightfully recognize the
relatively stronger influence of Durkheim and, especially, Weber (Brubaker
1985; DiMaggio 1979; Swartz 1997, 2013). These critics notwithstand-
ing, Bourdieu clearly appropriates a number of key themes from Marx,
which I identify below. Honneth (1986: 55) and Garnham and Williams
(1980: 129) see a significant Marxist lineage in Bourdieu’s emphasis on
the role of class struggle in shaping contemporary culture. But Bourdieu’s
concept of class is hardly Marxist (Joppke 1986; Weininger 2005); his
emphasis on struggle stems more from an anthropological premise that a
search for distinction constitutes a fundamental dynamic of social identity
than it does from dynamics specific to capitalism. Marxist critics (e.g.
Burawoy and Von Holdt 2012) point out in particular the Durkheimian
 7  BOURDIEU ON THE STATE: BEYOND MARX?  155

lineage. And some efforts to classify Bourdieu as Marxist reflect more the
political strategy of assigning stigmatizing labels than serious scholarly
undertakings to identify the intellectual influences on Bourdieu’s work.
One such example is Ferry and Renault (1990) who classify Bourdieu as a
May 68 thinker; another is Alexander’s (1995) attempt to marginalize
Bourdieu’s influence in the sociology of culture in order to legitimate
Alexander’s own “cultural sociology.”1
Bourdieu (1990: 3–33) himself resisted being classified within any sin-
gle intellectual tradition, especially Marxism. For at least three reasons.
First, in his view such classifications serve more like stigmatizing labels
designed to differentiate insiders from outsiders than helpful theoretical
clarifications.2 Clearly calling one a Marxist in the United States today
marginalizes their work irrespective of its quality. Second, such classifica-
tions reflect a scholastic mode of thinking—a preoccupation with correct
categorizations—rather than a research orientation aiming to come to
grips with empirical realities. A third reason, and one Bourdieu does not
mention, is that resisting theoretical self-identification can be a strategy of
intellectual distinction, whereby the individual highlights the originality of
their own position by downplaying the extent and significance of their
intellectual borrowings. Intellectual debts are downplayed or passed over
in silence to emphasize originality! Though Bourdieu is not a Marxist,
many key ideas of Marx resonate in Bourdieu’s sociology.3
On the State (2014) assembles Pierre Bourdieu’s 1990–1991 Collège
de France lectures that offer the most comprehensive collection of his
reflections on the nature of the modern State. Weber is by far the most

1
 See (Wacquant 2001) and (Mauger 2012) for devastating critiques of Alexander’s polem-
ical enterprise. Mauger (2012: 39) argues that Bourdieu can no more be classified as a
Marxist, a Weberian, or a Durkheimian, since he draws significantly from all three.
Nonetheless, we are of the view that in terms of conceptualizing the State Bourdieu draws
more substantially from Weber without being a Weberian.
2
 Bourdieu (1990: 27) notes that labeling one a Marxist, a Weberian, or a Durkheimian, is
“almost always with a polemical, classificatory intention.” To say “‘Bourdieu, basically, is a
Durkheimian.’ From the point of view of the speaker, this is performative; it means: he isn’t
a Marxist, and that’s bad. Or else ‘Bourdieu is a Marxist,’ and that is bad. It’s almost always
a way of reducing or destroying, you.” Mauger (2012: 25) perceptively notes that this is
similar for the “Bourdieusian” label today!
3
 See Mauger (2012: 26) and Bourdieu (1990: 3–7) for testimony by Bourdieu that he
read seriously the writings of Marx when a student at the École Normale Supérieure as well
as their structuralist rendering by Louis Althusser but did not join or affiliate with the French
Communist Party as many of his peers did.
156  D. L. SWARTZ

frequently referenced followed by Durkheim, Elias, and then Marx,

though in the English translation there are separate entries for “Marxism,”
the “Marxist tradition,” and “Marxists.” One does not find in these lec-
tures, or elsewhere in Bourdieu’s writings, a sustained and systematic dis-
cussion of Marx’s view of the State or of the social order more generally.
Fewer than two pages are devoted to a brief section labelled “The Marxist
tradition.” There are just four references to Engels, and his famous paper
“The Origins of Family, Private Property, and the State” is not discussed.
In The State Nobility, Bourdieu’s (1996) other book where the State
receives consideration, there are only four references to Marx and Marxism
and most of these have nothing to do with the State. By contrast, Bourdieu
(1987) does give more conceptual attention to portions of Weber’s work,
in particular his sociology of religion. In general, one finds passing allu-
sions to Marx, brief remarks, largely critical, an occasional quote (often
without textual reference), but no systematic and sustained discussion.4
Nor do important heirs and elaborators of Marx’s thinking receive
more than passing attention. On the State has only four references to
Antonio Gramsci (1971) none of which really engage his thinking. Nicos
Poulantzas is referenced only twice. Bourdieu (2014: 77–83) does offer
some discussion of two of Perry Anderson’s works, Passages from Antiquity
to Feudalism (1974b) and Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974a), and
does discuss briefly Barrington Moore’s (1966) The Social Origins of
Dictatorship and Democracy, which are situated within the Marxist tradi-
tion. Most of the Marxist-informed analyses cited in the lectures are cate-
gorized as structural Marxists who are centrally preoccupied with the
degree of autonomy of the State relative to civil society—the dominant
classes in particular—and with the legacy of the French Revolution for
understanding the origins of modern capitalist societies, such as England
and Japan. As grouped, they draw sharp criticism from Bourdieu, as we
point out below. That said, Marx stirs in the background of Bourdieu’s
thinking often as the straw man for Bourdieu to sharpen his own emphasis
on the symbolic dimension of State power.

4
 By contrast, in an earlier work, The Logic of Practice (Bourdieu 1990), that elaborates
Bourdieu’s theory or practice, Marx is cited more than Durkheim or Weber.
 7  BOURDIEU ON THE STATE: BEYOND MARX?  157

Marx’s View of the State

As Ralph Miliband (1973: 128) points out, “Marx himself never attempted
to set out a comprehensive and systematic theory of the State,” though he
did entertain a long-term project of doing so.5 But in review of all of the
relevant texts, Miliband concludes that two general perspectives emerge
from Marx’s writings. The “primary view” is expressed in the famous for-
mulation of the Communist Manifesto of the Communist Party: “The exec-
utive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common
affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Moreover, political power is “merely the
organized power of one class for oppressing another” (quoted in Miliband
1973). Here Marx and Engels portray the State as class based and as a
centre for coordination and control of capitalist class property interests.
This is an instrumental view of State function. It is also a unitary view of
State action.
A “secondary view” is to be found in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte.” There, Marx depicts the State as being relatively inde-
pendent of all social classes and the dominant force in society, the extreme
case of this being Louis Bonaparte’s authoritarian personal rule, its bureau-
cratic despotism, or Bonapartism. Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état created an

executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization,

with its ingenious state machinery, embracing wide strata, with a host of
officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half million,
this appalling parasitic body which enmeshed the body of French society like
a net and chokes all its pores. (Quoted in Miliband 1973: 136)

But the Bonapartiste State nonetheless remained the protector of the

dominant class as Marx noted:

And yet the state power is not suspended in mid-air. Bonaparte represents a
class, and the most numerous class of French society at that, the small-­
holding peasants. (Quoted in Miliband 1973: 137)

5
 Burawoy (Burawoy and Von Holdt 2012: 41) notes in passing that the State is under-
theorized by Marx even though it plays a key role in understanding the relations of the work-
ing class to the capitalist class, most notably in the numerous failures by the working class to
mount a successful revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system.
158  D. L. SWARTZ

Much has been made of the secondary view among certain Marxist
scholars. It provoked sharp debate that pitted those (e.g. Ralph Miliband)
who saw Marx taking an instrumental view of class control of the State
versus those (e.g. Nicos Poulantzas) who stressed more the structural
dependency of the State largely for financial reasons on the bourgeoisie.
Bourdieu did not participate in that debate. His writing on the State
would come years later. But in retrospect Bourdieu dismisses that debate
as fundamentally flawed as both sides are wedded to the idea of class rule
of the State, the only difference being in the modality of class rule. He
(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 113) refers to them as “armchair
Marxists,” “those materialists without materials,” such as Nicos Poulantzas
(1973) and Theda Skocpol (1979), who engage in “scholastic” debate
over the relative autonomy or dependence of the State on the dominant
classes. Whether stressing an instrumental or structural view of State
power, both sides tend to think of the State as “a well-defined, clearly
bounded and unitary reality which stands in a relation of externality with
outside forces that are themselves clearly identified and defined” (Bourdieu
and Wacquant 1992: 111). By contrast, Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant
1992: 111) says that

what we encounter, concretely, is an ensemble of administrative or bureau-

cratic fields (they often take the empirical form of commissions, bureaus,
and boards) within which agents and categories of agents, governmental
and nongovernmental, struggle over this peculiar form of authority consist-
ing of the power to rule via legislation, regulations.

Rather than speculating on dependency or autonomy one needs to

“examine the historical genesis of a policy, how this happened, how a
regulation, a decision or a measure was arrived at, etc.” (Bourdieu 2014:
112). One cannot give a once-and-for-all answer to the question.

State Development and Ideology

in Historical Materialism

The central argument of Marx is that social orders are best understood in
terms of their mode of production, the economic base of society, of which
there are two key features: the ongoing increase in the forces of produc-
tion, and the conflicting social class relations that pit those profiting from
their control over the means of production and the surplus thus generated
 7  BOURDIEU ON THE STATE: BEYOND MARX?  159

versus those who simply labour in the productive process. All politics, law,
religion, cultural, and institutions like the State emerge out of that funda-
mental conflict between those who own the means of production and
those who do not. The State, in other words, forms part of the superstruc-
ture of society.
Of key concern to Marx is the movement of history as the forces of
production increase, and the social relations of production need to adjust
to the new realities of productivity. Engels argues, in the few passages in
The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State where he addresses
this issue, that the State emerged out of class conflict over economic inter-
ests. The State emerged out of civil society to moderate class conflict. It
shifted the organization of social affiliation from blood line to territory
and developed the coercive forces (army and police), economic resources
(through taxation and public debt), and a corps of officials that stand
above civil society. The State develops first from the need to moderate
class antagonisms but then becomes the instrument of the dominant
group; it becomes a “machine for the oppression of one class by another.”
Out of this dynamic of class struggle over periods of history and civiliza-
tions eventually emerges capitalist society in which Marx believes that the
working class will ultimately triumph over the capitalist class and bring to
a final resolution a full socialization of the forces of production that private
property never permitted. The State is a key institutional force in this his-
torical struggle, first as a formidable obstacle to working-class mobiliza-
tion and then as a working-class instrument in making the transition to a
socialized organization of the economy. Once the fetters of private appro-
priation of the productive forces and their surplus are broken, the tradi-
tional function of the State will no longer be needed and will wither away
in the new communist society.
The working class, however, faces formidable obstacles in its effort to
enact this historical outcome, most notably from the State that protects
disproportionally the interests of the capitalist class against the working
class. The State does this by deploying the means of violence against
working-­class mobilization, by generating legal measures to protect pri-
vate property interests, and by producing an ideology to justify all of this
in the name of the common interest. Marx clearly saw ideology as a force-
ful means by which the capitalist State imposed dominant class ideas onto
subordinate groups. And Marx saw his historical materialism as an alterna-
tive way for the working class to view the real functions of the State and to
mobilize in opposition accordingly. However, Marx did not explore
160  D. L. SWARTZ

extensively just how this ideology is imposed. In this famous passage often
quoted from The German Ideology, Marx and Engels (Tucker 1978: 172)
point to class control over the means of intellectual production:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class
which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling
intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at
its disposal, has control at the same time of the means of mental production,
so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of
mental production are subject to it. (Quoted from Tucker 1978: 172)

Yet, just how ruling ideas make their way into the everyday practices
and understandings of workings received little attention from Marx.
Material control over the production and dissemination of ideas needed to
be fleshed out. He was clearly aware that workers did not always and spon-
taneously respond to their conditions of exploitation or to the historical
materialist explanation of them. In The Poverty of Philosophy Marx (see
Tucker 1978: 218) noted that class-in-itself does not always translate into
class-for-itself. In other words, workers sharing common conditions of
exploitation do not always see their common condition and mobilize
accordingly. There is a problem of false consciousness.
Marx, of course, argued that the transition to socialism required a cer-
tain level of productive forces, but he was also centrally concerned with
working-class consciousness and mobilization. Indeed, why in the most
affluent centres of capitalist development did workers not rise up success-
fully to bring on the transition to socialism? The problem of working-class
consciousness, or false consciousness, has been a gnawing problem for
Marxists since Marx. Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) view of hegemony is per-
haps one of the must fruitful contributions in Marxist thinking to address
this issue. And it is to this question that Bourdieu’s view of the state offers
a provocative challenge to Marxist thought.

Bourdieu’s View of the State

Though later in his conceptual development, Bourdieu’s view of the mod-
ern State follows themes present in much of his earlier work: the impor-
tance of symbolic power, the concentration of different types of capital,
the struggle over those capitals in fields, and the interest in disinterested
 7  BOURDIEU ON THE STATE: BEYOND MARX?  161

pursuits.6 Bourdieu conceptualizes the modern State as an elaboration of

Weber’s classic and widely used institutional definition of the State as
holding the monopoly of physical violence over a specific territory.
Bourdieu (1994: 3) defines the State as that institution that “successfully
claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical and symbolic violence
over a definite territory and over the totality of the corresponding popula-
tion (emphasis added).” This definition points to Bourdieu’s understand-
ing of power, one clearly influenced by Weber and Elias in that power
must be legitimated in order to be exercised in any enduring and effective
way. An emphasis, Bourdieu argues, is insufficiently grasped by Marx’s
view of ideology.
Bourdieu’s analysis of the State, therefore, focuses on the symbolic
dimension of the State, but he understands that in terms of positions,
interests, beliefs, and strategies of agents in fields. The State is also a field
of ideological production. Bourdieu (1994: 16) speaks of the “effect of
the universality” as the “symbolic dimension of the effect of the State.”
This results from the interests and strategies of civil servants producing a
“performative discourse” that both legitimates and constitutes the State as
the guardian of the public interests and therefore the wielder of consider-
able symbolic power in the struggle to dominate the social order. Thus,
appeals to civic-mindedness, public order and the public good are seen as
flowing from the interests and strategies of agents of the State as they
struggle to enhance the administrative reach of their governing agencies.
This illustrates Bourdieu’s way of thinking about ideology by focusing on
the producers of ideology and their field positions and interests. Their
most immediate ideological interests do not trace back to location in the
social relations of production (as theorized in Marxism) but to location in
the social relations of symbolic production (Bourdieu 1994). Hence, the
State becomes a field of ideological production and develops relative
autonomy from both civil society and the economy; the actions of State
actors need to be understood primarily in terms of their positions and
capital holdings and strategies within the array of bureaucratic fields
Bourdieu considers as the State.
This relative autonomy theme shares some similarity to the “second
view” of the State mentioned above. The theme was made popular in
France by Louis Althusser (1977). As a young scholar at the Ecole Normale
Supérieure, Bourdieu was influenced by Althusser’s teaching as well as the

6
 See Swartz (2013: chap. 5) for a more complete analysis of Bourdieu’s view of the State.
162  D. L. SWARTZ

tremendous influence of Althusserian Marxism in France during the 1960s

and 1970s. However, Bourdieu sharply criticized the structural Marxism
elaborated by many followers of Althusser.7 Bourdieu took to task
Althusserian structuralism for lacking an adequate theory of agency. He
rejects the implication that agents are merely acting out the logic of struc-
tures (Bourdieu 1990: 20; 2014: 96). Bourdieu wants a view of action in
which social agents are shaped by their historical structures (their habitus)
but are not totally dependent on them. It is the intersection of habitus and
structures (fields) that generates practices. But the conceptual language of
“relative autonomy” of the State nonetheless illustrates some Althusserian
influence.8
Thus, Bourdieu offers an expansive view of the State power, similar to
Michel Foucault (2008) in this respect, and to Althusser’s (1977) idea of
“ideological State apparati” that shapes our most fundamental everyday
ways of thinking and ordering our lives. But in comparison to Foucault,
Bourdieu still insists on the concentration of State power within certain
fields of struggle. It is a diffused power but also a concentrated one.
Relative to Althusser, Bourdieu rejects the Althusserian conceptual lan-
guage of “apparati” arguing that they are too static and scholastic in ori-
entation. Bourdieu sees his language of fields of struggle as more dynamic
and open to a broader array of possible historical forces that can come into
play in any given period.9 The concept of field invites empirical investiga-
tion rather than conceptual foreclosure as the Althusserian language sug-
gests. In the Marxist tradition, this emphasis on the symbolic power of the

7
 See the scathing criticism that Bourdieu (1975) fires at the Althusserians.
8
 Batou and Keucheyan (2014) come to this conclusion as well. Though Bourdieu’s idea
of the relative autonomy of fields bears the imprint of Althusser’s thought, the idea of relative
autonomy can also be found in Weber’s concept of spheres from which Bourdieu elaborates
more directly his concept of field.
9
 As arenas of struggle, the concept of fields is more open to resistance to the dominant
powers than Althusser’s concept of “ideological status apparatus” suggests. Moreover,
Bourdieu sees his concept of field to be more attentive to historical variation. He (Bourdieu
1990: 88) stresses that “as a game structured in a loose and weakly formalized fashion, a field
is not an apparatus obeying the quasi-mechanical logic of a discipline capable of converting
all action into mere execution.” But “under certain historical conditions, which must be
examined empirically, Bourdieu (1992: 102) [admits that] a field may start to function as an
apparatus.” In Bourdieu’s thinking, certain dictatorial regimes can take on apparatus-like
characteristics.
 7  BOURDIEU ON THE STATE: BEYOND MARX?  163

State comes closest to Gramsci’s (1971) view of hegemony.10 A view not

lost on an astute Marxist thinker like Burawoy (Burawoy and Von Holdt
2012: 51–67). Indeed, both hegemony and symbolic power serve to
answer the same question: why do subordinate groups not rise up and
contest their subordinate positions within the social order?

Bourdieu’s “Genetic History” of Modern States

In the 1989–1991 Collège de France lectures, Bourdieu (2014) offers a
“genetic history” of modern States that stands in sharp contrast to Marx’s
understanding of modern State development. It is a social history of the
State emerging as a field of conflict among various contenders for power
to legitimate rule over a given territory and that privileges the contingent
and arbitrary nature of its institutional origins rather than functional
necessity or some unfolding historical logic as Bourdieu finds in Marxism.
In the lectures, Bourdieu reviews a considerable body of theoretical writ-
ings and historical investigations relative to modern State formation. He
devotes particular attention to the models of Max Weber (1978), Norbert
Elias (1982), Charles Tilly (1992), and Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer
(1985) as he formulates his own model. But no systematic attention is
given to the argument by Engels. In a 1993 paper, “Rethinking the State:
Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” Bourdieu (1994: 4)

10
 This chapter will not address the important comparison to be made between Bourdieu’s
theory of symbolic power and violence and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Burawoy
(Burawoy and Von Holdt 2012: 51–67) notes a number of common themes in their work
that are not pursued by Bourdieu, such as the importance of class struggle, their common
criticisms of positivism and determinism, and the importance accorded to culture. Even
Gramsci’s key notion of “hegemony,” despite its clear overlap with Bourdieu’s focus on
symbolic domination and violence, receives little attention from Bourdieu. Bourdieu occa-
sionally makes sharply critical references to Gramsci, but he appears to have in mind more the
concept of “organic intellectuals” than the idea of hegemony. Bourdieu is largely dismissive
of the idea of organic intellectuals, categorizing it as but a variation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea
of the “fellow traveler” of the French Communist Party [see (Swartz 2013: 169–170) on
this]. That said, Bourdieu tends to depict his emphasis on the struggle for symbolic power as
more dynamic than the concept of hegemony. But in other parts of his work, Bourdieu
stresses the omnipresence of the State monopoly over symbolic classifications that is very
difficult to break through just as the pervasiveness of hegemony is difficult to undercut. As
Batou and Keucheyan (2014) suggest, there was probably good intellectual field reasons for
Bourdieu not engaging seriously Gramsci. During the 1960s and 1970s, Gramsci was largely
being discussed by the Althusserian camp of French intellectuals, and Bourdieu was clearly
hostile to the philosophical style of structural Marxism they propagated.
164  D. L. SWARTZ

proposes a “model of the emergence of the State.” The modern State

emerges from

the culmination of a process of concentration of different species of capital:

capital of physical force or instruments of coercion (army, police), economic
capital, cultural capital or (better) informational capital, and symbolic capi-
tal. It is this concentration as such which constitutes the state as the holder
of a sort of metacapital granting power over other species of capital and over
their holders.

In describing the logic of modern State development, Bourdieu sees

progressive concentrations of physical capital (physical coercion), eco-
nomic capital, informational (or cultural) capital, and symbolic capital.
From these concentrations emerges statist capital, a special type of capital,
a kind of metacapital that “enables the State to exercise power over the
different fields and over the different particular species of capital, and
especially over the rates of conversion between them (and thereby over the
relations of force between their respective holders)” (Bourdieu 1994: 4).
Statist capital represents an emergent metacapital, a regulatory power over
the field of power and the broader society. It is State authority.
Thus, Bourdieu follows Weber and Elias in conceptualizing the modern
State as fundamentally concerned with monopolizing the means of vio-
lence over a particular territory and corresponding population. This stance
overlaps to some extent with Marx’s view of State origins: the need to
control the violence generated by private appropriation of the means of
production. But Bourdieu extends the monopolizing function to the
means of symbolic violence, an emphasis Bourdieu sees as distinct from
that of Weber and Elias, as well as that of Marx. Mobilization of forces of
order (warriors, army, police) also requires justification, building solidar-
ity, and obtaining social recognition, which in Bourdieu’s view validates
his emphasis on the importance of legitimation as symbolic power and
capital.
The State emerges as there develops a specialized corps (e.g. police,
army) of agents who wield violence. The concentration of physical capital
in the hands of a few is paralleled by the concentration of economic capital
through taxation. Bourdieu (1998b) sees these processes as occurring
simultaneously or “dialectically” rather than sequentially. They are “inter-
dependent.” By contrast, Marx focuses on the rise of private property as
the first causal force. Bourdieu stresses how the processes of unification of
 7  BOURDIEU ON THE STATE: BEYOND MARX?  165

a territory and people through a concentration of the means of violence

and through a national economic market are paralleled by a concentration
of “symbolic capital” (i.e., the authority to exercise symbolic power). The
processes of assembling police, military, and economic resources become
operative only as they obtain social recognition and hence legitimacy.
Taxation, for example, which must develop to pay for armed forces, raises
the issue of legitimation. Indeed, the thrust of Bourdieu’s (1994: 4–8)
argument suggests that in order for the State to monopolize physical vio-
lence it must have already captured considerable symbolic capital, that is,
considerable legitimacy in order to do that.
The modern bureaucratic State emerges initially out of the transition
from medieval family dynasties to royal households and to the emergence
of legal and administrative authorities that represent independent fields of
conflict with their own specific forms of power (capitals) (Bourdieu 2005:
34–48). The emergence and consolidation of power by legal authorities
are key to this process in which jurists play a leading role (Bourdieu 1994;
2004, 43–48). Clerks and jurists attached to the dynastic State create a
social space for themselves through their writings laying claim to authori-
tative nomination and classification (Bourdieu 1994b). Ideas such as sov-
ereignty and kingship eventually come to be understood as something
above and beyond the person of the king (Bourdieu 2005). The problems
of hereditary succession, palace wars, and so on lead to the development
of forms of authority independent of kinship and the royal household.
This is the beginning of the “impersonal” character of bureaucracy.
Bourdieu (2005: 48–51) describes this process of “progressive dissocia-
tion” of dynastic authority. Bureaucratic authority occurs as a differentia-
tion process through the increasing creation of new links of delegation of
authority and responsibility. Here he elaborates directly from Elias. As this
occurs the locus of power shifts from the person to that of the field. This
lengthening of the chain of authorities and responsibilities creates a “veri-
table public order.” Each link becomes a centre of relatively autonomous
power, or a new power field. There is a shift from power vested in persons
to power vested in positions and fields. The State then becomes that meta-
field that attempts to regulate all the other emergent fields.
166  D. L. SWARTZ

Origins of the State Nobility and Ideology

of Public Service

A State nobility emerges with the development of the modern State

(Bourdieu 1996: 379). The rise of the State is connected to the ascent of
a corps of civil servants. The ascent of the State nobility is also linked to
the emergence of public educational institutions and particularly to the
development of an elite track within French public education leading to
top positions within the State. Bourdieu thus sees the origins of the mod-
ern State rooted in a gradual shift in type of mode of succession, from one
founded on hereditary and bloodline to one founded on individual merit
(education). The transition from the dynasty to the modern State is also a
change from a family to an education mode of reproduction (Bourdieu
2005: 40).
Bourdieu also emphasizes the ideological dimension of the rise of the
modern State. The ascent of the modern State nobility is described in
terms of the transformation of the culture of the old aristocracy of “service
to the king” to the new ideology of “public service” (Bourdieu 1996:
379). With the State nobility appears a disinterested ideology toward uni-
versal ends. The State nobility is a new form of nobility with a new form
of ideology (“sociodocy,” to use Weber’s term) to justify its privileged
existence, that of public service. Thus, Bourdieu describes the cultural and
social production of modern French administrative elites, the modern
French technocracy, with the historical analogy in mind of the production
of the aristocracy under the Old Regime. The technocratic elite (members
of the grands corps emanating from École Polytechnique and, especially,
École Nationale d’Administration are the highest expressions) are the
contemporary structural and functional equivalents of the old aristocratic
nobility.

Field of Power and the State

Bourdieu’s conception of the State is linked to his concept of the field of
power, which represents the upper reaches of the social class structure
where individuals and groups bring considerable amounts of various kinds
of capital into their struggles for distinction and power. This contrasts
with Marx’s capitalist class centred on ownership of the means of produc-
tion. Struggles within the field of power are polarized between holders of
economic capital and cultural capital. The State, however, is an arena of
 7  BOURDIEU ON THE STATE: BEYOND MARX?  167

struggle for statist capital, which is power over other types of capital,
including economic capital and cultural capital, over their ratio of exchange
and their reproduction (Bourdieu 1994: 4). The State functions as a kind
of metafield, with statist capital representing the capacity to regulate rela-
tions among other types of capital. Thus, compared to Marx and Engels,
the State for Bourdieu plays a regulatory role, but the sources of conflict
do not reduce to private property.
The field of power and the State appear to overlap conceptually. The
field of power is “defined as the space of play within which holders of capi-
tal (of different species) struggle in particular for power over the State, i.e.,
over the statist capital granting power over the different species of capital
and over their reproduction (particularly through the school system)”
(Bourdieu 1994: 5). The State is a particular set of agencies and organiza-
tions—an ensemble of bureaucratic fields—within the broader arena of
the field of power. On the one hand, Bourdieu (1994: 4; Bourdieu and
Wacquant 1992: 114) says that the development of the State parallels the
development of the field of power (they emerge together) as an arena of
struggle where holders of different kinds of capital struggle for control
over the State (struggle for statist capital). The struggle in the field of
power is, in fact, struggle for control of the State. On the other hand,
Bourdieu sees the State as an arena of struggle for control over the field of
power when he (1994: 4) writes that “the State as the holder of a sort of
meta-capital granting power over other species of capital and over their
holders.” This is the struggle to gain statist capital for power over other
forms of capital and their reproduction. It is in the State where the strug-
gle for power is, in fact, a struggle for control over relations of other fields
in the field of power. Thus, the State functions to regulate the rate of
exchange among the various forms of capital in the field of power.
The State as a distinct field generates its own particular sets of interests.
Thus, Bourdieu thinks of the State as a kind of metafield, with its own
relative autonomy that mediates the struggle for the dominate principle of
legitimation among the various power fields, such as the cultural field, the
economic field, and the scientific field. An important implication from this
analysis of the State in terms of capitals and fields is, as Wacquant (2005)
points out, that Bourdieu does not see political conflict directly linked to
class interests, as Marx tends to do, but more differentiated and mediated
in that it involves conflicts among elites with different kinds of capitals
(cultural as well as economic), and different modes of capital reproduction
(through education as well as through property ownership).
168  D. L. SWARTZ

Bourdieu (2000: 127) therefore sees the State “marked by a profound

ambiguity.” On the one hand, the modern State functions as “a relay … of
economic and political powers which have little interest in universal inter-
ests” represented by the ideology of public service. Here one sees the
influence of dominant groups, particularly those strong in economic capi-
tal, shaping activities of the State. This is consistent with the “primary
view” of State power set forth by Marx and Engels. On the other hand,
the State functions as a kind of neutral “referee” (Bourdieu 1990: 137)
that enforces the rules of the game in the field of power; that is, it adjudi-
cates power relations between competing groups. Those rules reflect, in
part, the historical struggles leading to the welfare provisions of the State.
This orientation of the State is more favourable to the ideals of justice and
dominated groups than would be the free reign of economic interests
(Bourdieu 2000: 127). Later in his career Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1998a,
1999) comes to see this latter function more and more threatened by neo-
liberalism and he becomes a staunch defender of the Welfare State against
globalization.
For Bourdieu (2014: 97–101), Marx and Marxists miss the real signifi-
cance of universal values embodied by the State. They miss the Janus char-
acter of the State (both positive and negative, progressive and regressive)
by focusing one-sidedly on the vested interest of State actors. By contrast,
Bourdieu understands the development of the modern State as forging an
ideology for the common good, for the universal (hence the positive, the
progressive), whilst simultaneously creating a corpus of particular agents
whose actions attempt to monopolize this universal value as their own
vested interest. Thus, the State embodies a fundamental ambiguity: it is
neither prisoner of dominant class rule, as Marxists charge, nor the neutral
referee, as pluralism would have; rather, it embodies both as State manag-
ers who pursue their own interests in defending and advancing the ideals
of disinterested public service. Bourdieu argues that Marxists, including
structural Marxists drawing inspiration from Althusser’s idea of “ideologi-
cal state apparati,” accord insufficient importance to the “symbolic effects”
of this public service ideology. It is the distinguishing emphasis on the role
of symbolic power that sets Bourdieu apart from a Marxist view of the
State. Marx’s emphasis on the vested interests of State bureaucrats who
usurp the public interest in pursuit of their own private interests ignores
“the very real effects of the obligatory reference to the values of neutrality
and disinterested loyalty to the public good. Such values impose them-
selves with increasing force upon the functionaries of the State” (Bourdieu
 7  BOURDIEU ON THE STATE: BEYOND MARX?  169

1994: 17). Marx only sees one side, that of agents driven by interests,
whereas there is a dual reality.
Finally, both Marx and Bourdieu looked upon their scholarship as a
form of political engagement. While Marx worked toward the abolition of
the bourgeois State and its replacement with working-class political orga-
nization, Bourdieu, though a sharp critic of the aristocratic State technoc-
racy, sought to preserve the gains in social inclusion and protection
embedded in the State from previous class struggles rather than reversing
the entire capitalist order. Though Bourdieu follows Durkheim in seeing
an increasing division of labour in modern societies, he rejects any unilat-
eral evolutionary schema for historical development that one finds in
Marx. Thus, Bourdieu gives no reason to think that the State might even-
tually wither away as Marx speculates for a communist society.

Thematic and Methodological Similarities

Though we do not find in Bourdieu’s writings a sustained discussion of
Marx, the founder of historical materialism is a critical reference for
Bourdieu. The significance of Bourdieu’s relationship to Marx lies less in
an attempt to appropriate particular concepts and to give them specific
Marxist applications than in an effort to elaborate upon certain themes
that resonate in Marx by drawing more directly from the work of Durkheim
and, especially, Weber (Brubaker 1985) and from Elias (1982) in the case
of the State.11 Though we have stressed what sets Bourdieu apart from key
ideas in Marx’s thinking, it is worth noting some key similarities between
Marx and Bourdieu that are particularly relevant for thinking about
the State.
The spirit of critique that one finds in the young Marx’s letter to Arnold
Ruge, the “ruthless criticism of everything existing” (Tucker 1978: 13),
certainly animates Bourdieu’s approach to exposing power relations of
existing institutional arrangements, including the State. We see this in
texts where Bourdieu points up the difficulty in adopting a critical posture
vis-à-vis the State since State legitimated classifications pervade most all
aspects of our lives (Bourdieu 1994). Bourdieu (2014: 367) finds in
Marx’s theory a powerful “symbolic revolution” that elicited hostile reac-
tions because it challenged fundamental taken-for-granted assumptions,

11
 See Desan’s (2013) analysis that, from a Marxist perspective, Bourdieu’s use of the lan-
guage of capital does not extend Marx’s concept but offers something quite different.
170  D. L. SWARTZ

categories of perception, and principles of vision and division of the social

world. It breaks with social contract theory and liberal pluralism. Bourdieu
(1990: 17) also claims that one can find elements in Marx’s writing, par-
ticularly in The German Ideology, for a critical sociology of sociology
though Marx himself never applied a critical history to Marxism itself nor
have most Marxists subsequently.
Like Marx, Bourdieu rejects pure theorizing or philosophizing without
any empirical referents. Bourdieu denounces scholastic reasoning
(Wacquant 2001: 105). Hence Bourdieu’s criticism of many followers of
Althusser’s structural Marxism. By referencing Marx’s use of the case of
England in developing his model of the capitalist mode of production,
Bourdieu (2014: 87) justifies his method of looking at particular exem-
plary cases (France and England) as illustrative of the universe of possible
cases (as opposed to the comparative historical method)—a methodologi-
cal theme running throughout much of Bourdieu’s work.
Bourdieu shares with Marx the methodological focus on structures that
undergird consciousness and the relations that link individuals and groups
“independently of individual consciousness and will,” as Marx put it (quo-
tation in Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 97). Like Marx, Bourdieu is fun-
damentally a relational thinker. The concept of field links actors through
structured relations rather than focusing on the intrinsic qualities of indi-
vidual units or their conscious strategizing. Thus, Bourdieu’s view of the
State is fundamentally relational (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 97;
Wacquant 2001: 106).
Finally, similar to Marx, but Weber as well, Bourdieu looks on the social
world as fundamentally agonistic (Wacquant 2001: 106). The State is not
a unitary actor but a site of competing interests, just as certain texts of
Marx project the dynamics of class struggle within the boundaries of
the State.

Conclusion
The great virtue of Marx’s understanding of the State is to call attention
to its function of protecting private property despite official claims to be a
neutral referee adjudicating conflicting claims and advancing the cause of
the common interest. Marx was, of course, not the first to say this; Adam
Smith (1981: 715), prior to Marx, put it succinctly:
 7  BOURDIEU ON THE STATE: BEYOND MARX?  171

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in

reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who
have some property against those who have none at all.

But it was Marx and his followers who mobilized a political movement
around this insight, an insight that remains true today even if property
interests of government have taken on new forms and Marxist-informed
politics has not successfully reversed this pattern.
In recent years research on new social movements points up the signifi-
cance of identity politics in struggles over the State resources and access to
positions within the State. Racial, ethnic, and gender issues provide pow-
erful mobilizing forces, and these do not always reduce to underlying eco-
nomic interests. Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the State as an ensemble
of bureaucratic fields of struggle to monopolize legitimate definitions and
classifications as well as control over economic and coercive resources
would seem like a useful elaboration of some of Marx’s insights. Marxists
will no doubt disagree and see Bourdieu’s thinking as a retreat from the
capitalist class character of the State. Marxists would consider that there is
only one relevant field and that is the capitalist mode of production in
modern societies. Agents act out the imperatives of this one field in which
they are embedded. By contrast, Bourdieu’s analysis is more complex as he
is concerned with how individuals move across multiple fields, how indi-
viduals socialized in one behave in another, how fields themselves pit dif-
ferent configurations of actors in struggle with different kinds of power
resources, and how actors misperceive these special interest struggles for
the common interest. Though he sees contributions in Bourdieu’s think-
ing that provide helpful additions to Gramsci’s important concept of State
hegemony, Burawoy (Burawoy and Von Holdt 2012: 45), inspired by
Gramsci, ends up concluding that Bourdieu retreats to a Hegelian idealist
position.
The Bourdieusian emphasis on symbolic power in stressing classifica-
tion struggles can, if pursued dogmatically, lose sight of the continuing
role that economic interests and their defence through means of coercion
play in modern States. Exclusive emphasis on the symbolic dimension of
State power tends to downplay the coercive and economic features of
modern States that are omnipresent despite the extraordinary efforts made
to legitimate them. Bourdieu would regret this unintended consequence
were it to occur.
172  D. L. SWARTZ

Still, Bourdieu’s original contribution is to call attention to the signifi-

cance of the multiple classification struggles within the State that Marx
and his followers tend to neglect. His State as a field framework opens the
investigation to the variety of possible types of power resources (capitals)
that actors (individuals, organizations, and institutions) employ in their
struggle for domination. Economic capital is one key resource in modern
societies but not the only one, and it too requires legitimation to be effec-
tive. Moreover, States are seldom unitary actors. As the field perspective
suggests, State actions often stem from conflicts and struggles within and
across bureaucratic fields. Bourdieu does not negate class analysis of the
State but offers the possibility of going beyond it when historical condi-
tions warrant. Herein lies the contributions of Bourdieu to understanding
the character of modern States. If Bourdieu’s framework is not employed
as a rigid model but as a framing device that is attentive to the particulari-
ties of historical situations, then it would seem to be as Bourdieu claims: a
useful elaboration of Weber’s thinking that offers a more intricate under-
standing of ideal as well as material interests and their respective carriers
than Marx imagined.

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 PART II

Inheriting Critique of Economic

Practices and Theories
 CHAPTER 8

Practice and Form: Economic Critique

with Marx and Bourdieu

Peter Streckeisen

The rapid succession of economic crises since the turn of the millennium
is generating a renewed interest in the work of Karl Marx and in the cri-
tique of economic science. According to a widespread view, economists
have failed: they were not able to foresee the crises, let alone to design
solutions. On the contrary, leading representatives of the profession are
summoned to be responsible for the crisis because of their publications
and recommendations. Even self-criticism can be heard in isolated cases:
German economist Straubhaar (2012),1 for example, calls for the “end of
economic imperialism, […] this belief that we are above the other sci-
ences.” He confesses he accepted economic beliefs for too long “even

Chapter translated from Streckeisen 2013. For a more in-depth argument, see
Streckeisen 2014. The term “economic critique” refers to “Ökonomiekritik”
in German.

1
 Quotation translated by the author.

P. Streckeisen (*)
Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Zurich, Switzerland
e-mail: p.streckeisen@unibas.ch

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 179

Switzerland AG 2022
G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and
Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_8
180  P. STRECKEISEN

though they did not correspond to empirical data.” If they did not want
to become useless for policymakers, economists should work more with
historians, psychologists, and sociologists. But a glance at the media or at
the members of government commissions shows that economists still are
experts in demand despite their collective failure. Economic orthodoxy
has not really been overthrown. The challenge has been less strong than at
Keynes’s time, when the crisis of the economists coincided not only with
a deep economic crisis, but also with fascism and world war.
Nevertheless, the new interest in Marx and in economic critique is
good news. But what are the promises of this critical thinking today? This
contribution deals with that question. I start from the premise that Marx
was not only a critic of economic science, but also a critical economist, a
political theorist, and a revolutionary activist. Which one of these perspec-
tives we adopt reading his texts is of crucial importance. Today it is impor-
tant to move away from a primarily economic reading of Capital and to
lay out the social theory foundations in Marx’s work. In addition, we must
consider that we are no longer dealing with the same economy as Marx
did. Both as a social system and as a science, the capitalist economy has
changed in many ways. Finally, I am convinced of the need to mobilize
different sources of critique. Using Marx and Bourdieu as examples, I
demonstrate how different approaches can both complement and chal-
lenge each other with the aim of advancing the cause of economic critique.
The paper is structured as follows: First, I specify what is meant by eco-
nomic critique. Second, I highlight some key concepts of the Marxian cri-
tique of political economy. Third, I outline Bourdieu’s theory of praxis as
an original approach to economic critique. Fourth, I discuss Bourdieu’s
attitude to Marx and to Marxism. Fifth, I challenge Bourdieu’s capital
theory with Marx as an example of a problematic replication of capital
concepts. Sixth, I conclude the article with an argument on the articula-
tion of different sources of economic critique.

Economic Critique
At no point did Marx clearly define what exactly he meant by his critique
of political economy. We can, however, try to reconstruct his critical inten-
tions. In my view, Marx’s critique works at three different levels: It is, first,
a systematic analysis of capitalist economy; second, Marx criticizes the cat-
egories of economic theory; and third, he develops a theory regarding the
interrelations between the economy as a social system and the economy as
 8  PRACTICE AND FORM: ECONOMIC CRITIQUE WITH MARX AND BOURDIEU  181

an academic discipline. His economic critique is essentially characterized

by the fact that it criticizes not only “this or that aspect of economic the-
ory” but the “very principles of the economic construction” (Bourdieu
1997, 48).2 In a sense, it goes the whole hog and analyses the social pro-
cesses that produce a capitalist economy as a reality on its own, as well as
the theoretical premises that tacitly underlie economic science. Heinrich
(2009, 32) insists on this point too: “Critique aims to dissolve the theoreti-
cal field (i.e., the quite self-evidently resulting notions) to which the cate-
gories of political economy owe their apparent plausibility.”
Economic critique is not the same as critical or heterodox economics—
a bundle of different approaches that also include Marxist economic the-
ory (Lee 2009; Kapeller and Springholz 2016). Critical economics is a
critique of economic orthodoxy from within the field, whereas economic
critique questions economic science as such, from the outside of the field.
For the theoretical field referred to by Heinrich (2004) is connected to the
social field of economic scholarship, comprising social institutions such as
research institutes, journals, university departments, professional associa-
tions, and academic conferences at which economists present their
research. Like any field (Bourdieu 1993, 72–77), it is determined by
power relations and rules of the game, which are permanently being
fought over. Even if they are irreconcilably opposed to orthodoxy, hetero-
dox economists share with their counterparts an interest in the existence
of economic science as an academic discipline, which usually leads them
not to ask certain questions that outsiders are inclined to raise. Heterodox
economists are actors in the economic field who, from a dominated posi-
tion attack those colleagues who, by virtue of their position and reputa-
tion, are able to shape the basic tenets of economic orthodoxy. However,
orthodox and heterodox economists usually share the belief that the econ-
omy must be studied from an economic perspective because it is a world
in itself. Sometimes they even share the belief that the social world as a
whole works out according to economic laws, and that human behaviour
in general is best understood from an economic point of view.
Economic critique and critical economics are not always clearly sepa-
rated: they can merge , and Marx’s Capital certainly is an interesting
example of the intertwining of the two perspectives. On the one hand,
Marx engages in fundamental economic critique in his magnum opus, but
he also sometimes enters the terrain of economists in order to improve

2
 Quotation translated by the author.
182  P. STRECKEISEN

economic theories. And Capital even contains paragraphs where Marx

succumbs to economistic views (Vincent 2001, 95–109; Hai Hac 2003).
According to Heinrich (2009, 90), two different discourses run through
Marx’s major work: a substantialist and naturalist theory of value, which
thinks in terms of economic labour theory of value, and a social theory of
value, which brings about a fundamental break with economic theory.
Those who want to pursue economic critique with Marx will turn to the
second discourse. But it is also necessary to keep an eye on his economistic
temptations, because they are an expression of the power of economic
thinking to which all of us are always exposed.
Today, the Marxian formulation critique of political economy is outdated
insofar as political economy has been marginalized in the field of econom-
ics. It has become a heterodox economic theory. Milonakis and Fine
(2009) describe the emergence and consolidation of neoclassical ortho-
doxy since the end of the nineteenth century as a historical process by
which society and history are expelled from economic science: Political
Economy is displaced by Economics, a rationalist behavioural science based
on mathematical models that studies human action as a relationship
between goals and scarce resources with alternative uses (Robbins 1932).
The neoclassical revolution has not only replaced the labour theory of
value with the marginal utility theorem. It is a theoretical purification of
economic sciences that forgets all reference to social realities and historical
processes. The price initially paid by economists is a narrowing of the field
as well as a cutting off from other social sciences and humanities. But in
the Cold War period the pendulum swung in the other direction and
economists began to apply their theory to all areas of social, political, and
cultural life. The affirmation of economics as the superior social science, or
even as the only real social science, is called economic imperialism (Fine
and Milonakis 2009), a concept first promoted by self-conscious econo-
mists like Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker. The economic conquest of the
social science and humanities academic fields is supported by non-­
economist scholars who introduce economic concepts into their own dis-
ciplines by adapting or translating them. An example in sociology and
political science is the social capital theory by Coleman (1988) and Putnam
(1993). Because neoclassical economics presents itself today as the science
of rational human behaviour, it is even more important for economic cri-
tique than in Marx’s time to build on a theory of practice that systemati-
cally contradicts the concept of homo economicus. It therefore makes sense
to combine Marx’s form theory with Bourdieu’s theory of practice.
 8  PRACTICE AND FORM: ECONOMIC CRITIQUE WITH MARX AND BOURDIEU  183

Form and Fetish (Marx I)

There is no doubt that Marx remains important today mostly as an eco-
nomic critic. As a critical economist, he discussed the theories that pre-
vailed at his time, which is primarily of historical interest today. The same
holds for his analysis of economic phenomena of his time. But what we can
pick up from him today are concepts that challenge economic science as
such, regardless of individual theories and historical events. And it turns
out that Marx’s form theory and his fetish theory are of a high topicality
and can still be used to criticize economic orthodoxy today. To make good
use of Marx for economic critique, however, means to read him differently
than it was, and in some cases still is, usual in Marxism. In the Marxist
tradition Capital was read as a book of economics that directly proves the
necessity of overcoming capitalism. This perspective ignores the radical
rupture with the theoretical field of economic theory and subjects the
analysis to political imperatives and to a constant prophetic temptation to
prophecy, which can produce a certain myopia and even true mental
barriers.
Reading Marx neither through an economic nor a political lens, but
interpreting his writings in terms of social theory, is not a completely dis-
tinctive proposition but in line with new Marx readings in the German-­
speaking world (that are not so new anymore) as well as at the global level
(Elbe 2008; Hoff 2009). Those who think that such an interpretation
produces an apolitical Marx ignore the political significance of economic
critique in the age of economic imperialism. According to the social the-
ory perspective proposed here, some traditional Marxist topics like labour
theory of value, crisis theory, or the famous transformation problem, lose
their centrality in favour of the form and fetish theory. I mention four
arguments in Capital that are of primordial importance for economic cri-
tique today: the critique of naturalization, the theory of social value forms,
the fetish theorem, and the concept of the vulgar economy.

1. Marx confronted economic theories that had not yet lost all refer-
ence to history and society as did the neoclassicism that developed
after his death. Still, he criticized the economists because they took
social conditions for natural conditions and regarded capitalism as
the necessary end point of human history. This critique of the natu-
ralization of social conditions runs like a thread through his writ-
ings. From the comparison of economists with theologians in the
184  P. STRECKEISEN

Poverty of philosophy (Marx 1973, 105) to the deconstruction of the

economic theory of the original sin in the context of primitive accu-
mulation (Marx 1974a, 667–668) to the statement that the ground
rent does not grow out of the soil, but out of society (Marx 1974a,
86), to give only three examples: Marx’s argument always empha-
sizes the historical specificity of capitalism and traces economic phe-
nomena back to social contexts. Social and cultural studies are always
confronted with the problem of naturalization, but Marx’s pioneer-
ing work on this topic is still underestimated or ignored today.
2. Anyone who sees only an economic labour-value theory at work in
Capital will not get very far in terms of economic critique. The radi-
cal departure from the theoretical field of economics has its roots in
the paragraphs where Marx describes value, the commodity, money,
or capital as social forms that shape people’s actions and thoughts in
a way that makes the production of capital and the reproduction of
capitalist relations possible in the first place and, indeed, probable.
Thus, Marx’s theory of value is not in theoretical continuity with
Ricardo’s, it rather represents a turn from economic theory to social
theory (Vincent 2001, 237–238). There are only a few sections
where Marx directly addresses the form theory foundations of his
critique, for example, in the fetish chapter of the first Capital I: “It
is one of the chief failings of classical economy that is has never suc-
ceeded […] in discovering that form under which value becomes
exchange value. […] The reason for this is not solely because their
attention is entirely absorbed in the analysis of the magnitude of
value. It lies deeper. The value form of the product of labour is not
only the most abstract, but is also the most universal form, taken by
the product in bourgeois production, and stamps that production as
a particular species of social production, and thereby gives it its spe-
cial historical character. If then we treat this mode of production as
one eternally fixed by Nature for every state of society, we necessar-
ily overlook that which is the differentia specifica of the value form,
and consequently of the commodity form, and of its further devel-
opments, money form, capital form etc.” (Marx 1974a, 85). The
discovery of social value forms makes it possible to examine capital
as a social force of socialization that dominates everyday practice.
Capitalist socialization is first and foremost a determination by form:
human thought and action are transformed into value form or into
value-producing form, for instance, when concrete labour is turned
8  PRACTICE AND FORM: ECONOMIC CRITIQUE WITH MARX AND BOURDIEU  185

into abstract labour, or when knowledge and skills are turned into
educational degrees of different value.
3. The link between form theory and the fetish theorem derives from
the fact that Marx also examined the phenomenology of capitalist
relations. In capitalism, social relations are represented in tangible
things, for example, in commodities, in money or in machines. In
this material appearance, however, they are invisible, while the things
that represent them seem to have a magic power that expresses the
social forces emerging out of the relations represented in them.
Marx uses the term fetish to name these peculiar things in whose
magic powers people believe. The most powerful fetish is not the
commodity, but capital. It is no accident that Marx repeatedly
employs religious metaphors in Capital: His economic critique is
inspired by a critique of religion. When he writes about an
“enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world” and mentions a true
“religion of everyday life” towards the end of Capital III (Marx
1974b, 830), we certainly should take this literally. The same applies
to the recurring comparison of economists and theologians, which
leads to the following point.
4. Marx distinguishes time and again between scientific economic the-
ory and vulgar economy. At the same time, he stresses that even the
best theorists of political economy, such as David Ricardo, “remain
more or less in the grip of the world of illusion which their criticism
had dissolved,” whereas vulgar economics “is no more than a didac-
tic, more or less dogmatic translation of everyday conceptions of the
actual agents of production, and […] arranges them in a certain
rational order” (Marx 1974b, 830). The distinction between scien-
tific theory and vulgar economics must not obscure the more impor-
tant argument: The capitalist “forms of thought” express the existing
conditions and relations of production in an “absurd form” but with
“social validity” (Marx 1974a, 80). They do not only shape every-
day understanding of the economy by lay persons but also influence
economic theory in academia. Economic critique attempts to dis-
solve the theoretical field of the capitalist everyday life religion,
while economists always also act as high priests of capital. The effec-
tiveness of the categories of capitalist economy lies in the fact that
they are “correct in the practical sense” for individual actors, as
Marx points out referring to the necessary illusion of the entrepre-
neur that s/he is a worker who is remunerated for their activity.
186  P. STRECKEISEN

They provide orientation and motivation for action in everyday life.

If, on the other hand, they are taken as the foundations of a scientific
theory of economy, this is “of course, preposterous” (Marx 1974b,
377). Marx’s analysis of the vulgar economy is reminiscent of
Durkheim’s (1982, 60) critique of prenotions, these “products of
common experience […] formed by and for experience” that are the
building blocks of a “spontaneous sociology” (Bourdieu et al. 1991,
20) that every serious scientific investigation must challenge.

Economy of Practice (Bourdieu I)

Bourdieu’s critique of economic science was for a long time overshadowed
by his sociology of culture. When he acted in the last years of his life as a
critic of neoliberalism, it was often ignored that the investigation of eco-
nomic phenomena and theories runs through his entire work and must be
seen as a necessary counterpart to his sociology of culture. His critique of
the notion of a pure culture and of the illusion of disinterestedness char-
acteristic of artists and intellectuals, and his critique of the notion of a pure
economy were ultimately two sides of the same coin. The emergence of
the capitalist economy as a social field where economic interests can be
openly and brutally articulated goes hand in hand in human history with
the emergence of increasingly autonomous fields of cultural production.
Therefore a complicity exists between the interests of economists and
those of cultural producers: “Interest, in the restricted sense it is given in
economic theory, cannot be produced without producing its negative
counterpart, disinterestedness. […] [T]he world of bourgeois man, with
his double-entry accounting, cannot be invented without producing the
pure, perfect universe of the artist and the intellectual and the gratuitous
activities of art-for-art’s sake and pure theory” (Bourdieu 1986, 242).
Bourdieu never had any reserve about economics and worked early on
with economists and statisticians at the French statistics and economics
institute INSEE (Lebaron 2003). His writings are characterized by a strat-
egy aimed at beating his opponents with their own weapons. Thus, he
criticizes economists for a one-sided and incomplete understanding of the
economy that prevents them from detecting its hidden mechanisms and
from perceiving economic facts that do not look economic at first glance.
In his early study of Algerian society under French colonial rule (Bourdieu
1958), he describes an economy that does not show itself as an economic
reality and is not perceived as such by Western economists: It is as if this
 8  PRACTICE AND FORM: ECONOMIC CRITIQUE WITH MARX AND BOURDIEU  187

society did not want to face its economic reality. Where economic acts are
practised as honorary transactions, Bourdieu discovers an economy of
concealment, an “anti-economic economy,” and thus invents a concept
that he will use in France to analyse cultural fields. The Algerian studies
served as a starting point for the formulation of a general theory of prac-
tice, which Bourdieu (1977) also calls an economy of practice. His
approach is based on the idea that everyday action is guided by uncon-
scious or semi-conscious orientations towards practical interests inscribed
in the internalized dispositions of the habitus. This economy is practical
“in the dual sense of implicit—i.e. non-theoretical—and expedient, i.e.
adapted to the exigencies and urgent pressures of action” (Bourdieu 2005,
9). And this practice is economic at the same time not only because it
obeys material interest, but also because it saves people from the necessity
to permanently think about what to do at any given moment.
While Bourdieu (1996) draws on economic concepts in The Rules of
Art to make visible the hidden economy of the literary field, his critique
of economy works on two levels. First, he questions economists’ view of
the social world, this “illusory anthropology” (Bourdieu 1997, 64–66) of
rationally calculating subjects whose apparent plausibility is based on the
hidden homology between the social structures of society and the mental
structures of habitus. Even in the field of economics, the picture of calcu-
lating action propagated by rational choice theory is deceptive: “It is not
decisions of the rational will and consciousness or mechanical determina-
tions resulting from external powers that underlie the economy of economic
practices—that reason immanent in practices—but the dispositions
acquired through learning processes associated with protracted dealings
with the regularities of the field; apart from any conscious calculation,
these dispositions are capable of generating behaviours and even anticipa-
tions which would be better termed reasonable than rational, even if their
conformity with calculative evaluation tends to make us think of them,
and treat them, as products of calculating reason” (Bourdieu 2005, 8–9).
Similar to Marx, the French sociologist deploys a constant effort in his
writings not only to criticize economic theories, but to explain their social
plausibility and efficacy by the same argument.
Second, Bourdieu counters economic orthodoxy with his own con-
cepts, among them, first of all, the notions of habitus, field, and practice,
which can be used to investigate economic processes and phenomena. In
Algeria, he experienced almost tangibly that the forms of economic
thought and action we are familiar with today are not natural at all: They
188  P. STRECKEISEN

presuppose an economic habitus that the Kabyle merchants and peasants

were forced to internalize only by the colonial system. The French soci-
ologist had pains at first to understand this pre-capitalist economy: “I
remember spending many an hour peppering with questions a Kabyle
peasant who was trying to explain a traditional form of the loan of live-
stock, because it had not occurred to me that, contrary to all economic
reason, the lender might feel an obligation to the borrower on the grounds
that the borrower was providing for the upkeep of an animal that would
have had to have been fed in any case” (Bourdieu 2005, 3). Much later he
described the economy as a field characterized by “the fact that here sanc-
tions are particularly brutal and the blatant pursuit of maximizing indi-
vidual material profit can be publicly made the target of behavior”
(Bourdieu 1997, 51).3 The structure of the field depends on the unequal
distribution of different forms of capital, on the basis of which large cor-
porations can emerge as dominant actors and influence the rules of the
game of economic competition. However, for Bourdieu, even in the eco-
nomic field the importance of non-economic forces is central. Thus,
against the image of the free market, he highlights the key role of the state:
“[T]he economic field is, more than any other, inhabited by the state,
which contributes at every moment to its existence and persistence, and
also to the structure of the relations of force that characterize it” (Bourdieu
2005, 12).

With Marx Against Marxism (Bourdieu II)

Bourdieu’s theory of practice is an original approach to economic critique
that strikes at the heart of neoclassical economics as a rationalist behav-
ioural science. But how does this approach relate to Marx? Obviously,
Marx’s early writings were a source of inspiration for the French sociolo-
gist. For instance, we find strategic quotations of Marx’s Theses on
Feuerbach in both books where Bourdieu presents his theory of practice in
detail. In the original edition of Outline of a Theory of Practice, the theo-
retical section is preceded by a quotation from the first thesis (whereas in
the English edition, it has been placed in the foreword: Bourdieu (1977,
vi), and in The Logic of Practice Bourdieu (1990, 145) starts his argument
on “practical logics” referring to Marx’s notion of the “concrete human
activity,” into which we must mentally dive if we want to be able to

 Quotation translated by the author.

3
 8  PRACTICE AND FORM: ECONOMIC CRITIQUE WITH MARX AND BOURDIEU  189

understand people’s practical relationship to the world. In these sections

devoted to analysing the relationships between social structure, habitus,
and praxis, the French sociologist is concerned to break out of the opposi-
tion between objectivism and subjectivism and all other associated kinds of
opposition. This idea, which runs through the entire work, is reminiscent
of the young Marx’s search for the real human being and real practice,
struggling with the abstractions of both idealist and materialist philosophy.
If the early Marxian writings left strong traces in Bourdieu’s work, the
same cannot be said of Marx’s later work, in which the critique of political
economy reaches its highest expression. It seems that the French sociolo-
gist did not read Capital, or at least did not include it in his own work.
But it is easy to see that some of Bourdieu’s concepts can be linked to
Marxian concepts. For example, the mental structures of the habitus
(Bourdieu) and the objective thought forms of capital (Marx) possess an
analogy. Marx’s concept could be enriched by Bourdieu’s theory on the
relationship between internalization and externalization which produces a
probabilistic determination of thought and action. And whereas Bourdieu’s
investigations into everyday practice and habitus focus on class-specific
forms of thought and action, Marx reminds us of the existence of cross-­
class forms of thought. In a similar way, the concepts of vulgar economy
(Marx) and spontaneous sociology (Bourdieu) can be brought together:
They both highlight the necessity of an epistemological break with every-
day thinking that scholars cannot accomplish once and for all but must
think of as a permanent task.
Throughout his work, Bourdieu maintained critical relations to
Marxism. Just as he challenged economists using economic notions, he
criticized Marxists quoting Marx. In What makes a Social Class he advances
an argument from Marx’s critique of Hegel against the Marxist illusion of
class realism: “In fact, the Marxist tradition commits the very same theo-
reticist fallacy of which Marx himself accused Hegel: By equating con-
structed classes, which only exist as such on paper, with real classes
constituted in the form of mobilized groups possessing absolute and rela-
tional self-consciousness, the Marxist tradition confuses the things of logic
with the logic of things” (Bourdieu 1987, 7). In the text, Bourdieu stresses
the importance of a political work of class production through forms of
representation (cognitive, political, theatrical), without which social classes
cannot exist in people’s minds. In his eyes, the protagonists of Marxism
have most often invested in this kind of political work without any critical
self-reflection, and they have been neither able nor inclined to understand
190  P. STRECKEISEN

what they themselves have contributed to the making of the working class,
and what price the workers had to pay for representations without which
they could not have exist as a social class. In Ce que parler veut dire
Bourdieu (1982, 207–226) takes aim at the pompous discourse (“discours
d’importance”) of Etienne Balibar by showing a cartoon character Marx
laughing at this all to diligent Marxist disciple using quotations from
German Ideology. Bourdieu wants to point out the conservative effect of
the intellectual superiority staged by this kind of Marxist philosophy that
thinks of itself as very important, and he provocatively states: “Since equal
causes have equal effects, it is not surprising that analyses can be found in
Marx’s polemic against Stirner that apply word for word to French read-
ings of Marx; or that particularly typical stylistic devices of the discourse of
importance can be found in philosophers as theoretically far apart as
Althusser and Heidegger, who, after all, share the sense of high theory
that is fundamental to the status of philosopher” (Bourdieu 1982, 166).4
By speaking in the name of revolution and workers’ interests, Marxist
philosophers, for Bourdieu, unconsciously do their part to exclude the
working class from the world of intellectuals.
Bourdieu’s polemic against Balibar shows that his critique of Marxism
also aims at the self-image of left-wing intellectuals. If someone calls him-
self a Marxist, this does not automatically mean that his intellectual prac-
tice is socially and culturally progressive, even if he thinks and intends so.
“The scholarly world is full of people who behave like revolutionaries
when they deal with things that do not concern them directly and like
conservatives when they have a personal stake in the matter,” he notes in
a conversation about Max Weber, adding, “often one is called right-wing
when one says the truth about the left” (Bourdieu et  al. 2011, 122).
Undoubtedly, there are many sections in the French sociologist’s writings
where Marxists might have a personal stake in the matter. In any case,
Bourdieu has done something different with the young Marx than
Marxism in its prevailing varieties: he has transferred key ideas of Marx’s
philosophical critique from the fields of political and philosophical discus-
sion to the field of empirical social research. If we understand Marx’s
Feuerbach theses as a call for a research programme, leave philosophical
abstractions behind and going in search of real people, then Bourdieu has
systematically followed this call. A book like Distinction (Bourdieu 2010),
which examines the cultural practices of the members of different social

4
 Quotations translated by the author.
 8  PRACTICE AND FORM: ECONOMIC CRITIQUE WITH MARX AND BOURDIEU  191

classes, is like a rich treasure box for anyone who, regardless of political
orientation, is really interested in how real people live.
It is beyond the scope of this paper to compare Bourdieu’s theory of
praxis to various strands of Marxism. But there is no doubt that in
Bourdieu’s eyes Marxism hardly ever succeeds in breaking out of the tra-
ditional oppositions between subjectivism and objectivism—or idealism
and materialism—which Lenin (1977) glorifies as the supreme principles
of thought in a particularly crude and politically disastrous way. Thus, for
Bourdieu, Marxist thinkers remain doomed to vacillate between the two
views, epitomized in postwar France, for example, by Sartre on the one
hand and Althusser on the other. In an interview with Terry Eagleton, he
justifies his practice of refusing the concept of ideology by his concern to
stay away from the Cartesian philosophy of consciousness characteristic of
Marxism (Bourdieu and Eagleton 1992). Even Gramsci’s philosophy of
praxis, which clearly represents a rupture with the dominant Marxism of
his time and according to Michael Burawoy shows a certain affinity with
Bourdieu’s approach (Burawoy and von Holdt 2012, 51–67), no doubt
only stops halfway as viewed through the lens of the French sociologist.
For example, when Gramsci writes that the popular common sense “can-
not constitute an intellectual order” (Gramsci 1999, 631), he thinks of it
as an incoherent reality and overlooks precisely what Bourdieu wants to
capture with the concept of habitus as a structured system of incorporated
dispositions. And when Gramsci (1999, 640) proclaims that, in contrast
to the Church, “the philosophy of praxis does not tend to leave the ‘sim-
ple’ in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead
them to a higher conception of life,” the philosopher’s sense of superior-
ity, which has not simply vanished into thin air through the beautiful sen-
tence according to which “all people are ‘philosophers’” (Gramsci 1999,
626), comes to light again.

Fictitious Capital and Capital Mimesis (Marx II)

But Bourdieu, for his part, pays a price for ignoring Marx’s mature writ-
ings and Capital in particular. The shortcomings of his capital theory,
which features the trios of economic, social and cultural capital, is an illus-
tration of that ignorance. In a famous contribution on the forms of capital,
Bourdieu uses many terms and formulations reminiscent of Marx. For
example, he refers to capital as “accumulated labor […] which, when
appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of
192  P. STRECKEISEN

agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or

living labor” (Bourdieu 1986, 241). This sentence seems to be very close
to Marx’s concept of exploitation. Further on in this text, Bourdieu (1986,
253) sketches a classical labour theory of value:

In accordance with a principle which is the equivalent of the principle of the

conservation of energy, profits in one area are necessarily paid for by costs in
another […]. The universal equivalent, the measure of all equivalences, is
nothing other than labor-time (in the widest sense); and the conservation of
social energy through all its conversions is verified if, in each case, one takes
into account both the labor-time accumulated in the form of capital and the
labor-time needed to transform it from one type into another.

By arguing this way, however, he overlooks an important insight of the

Marxian critique of political economy: labour produces capital only under
very specific conditions. It must take on a determined form for that pur-
pose, that is, it must turn to abstract labour and be performed under the
conditions of socially necessary labour-time.
If Bourdieu overlooks the importance of social forms in this paragraph,
this is not by simple accident. Rather, his theory of capital, which is based
on the analogy between social capital and cultural capital on the one side
and economic capital on the other, completely ignores the value form.
From a form theory perspective inspired by Marx one must inevitably
criticize such analogies. For example, labour accomplished to produce
social capital—that is, social relations and groups—is not abstract labour
in the Marxian sense of the term. And cultural capital such as educational
degrees cannot be bought and sold on the market. Neither social relations
nor education accumulate in a self-referential valorization process detached
from individual action. They cannot be described like capital in the
Marxian sense as a thing with an “automatically active character” that
“brings forth living offspring or, at the least, lays golden eggs” (Marx
1974a, 152). Attempting to further clarify the analogies between the dif-
ferent forms of capital, Bourdieu should have turned economic capital
into an object of his investigations, since he postulates that it underlies the
other types of capital. However, he deliberately abstained from this
endeavour. For instance, in Sociology in Question he states: “As regards
economic capital, I leave that to others; it’s not my area. What concerns
me is what is abandoned by others, because they lack the interest or the
 8  PRACTICE AND FORM: ECONOMIC CRITIQUE WITH MARX AND BOURDIEU  193

theoretical tools for these things, cultural capital and social capital”
(Bourdieu 1993, 32).
Bourdieu’s silence on economic capital leaves a void at the core of his
capital theory that plays into the hands of economic imperialism. Because
the power of capital and its economy—as a social system, but also as an
academic discipline—also relies on mimetic reproduction and dissemina-
tion of its social value forms. Marx (1974b, 464) grasped this phenome-
non in a section of Capital III devoted to the analysis of fictitious capital:
“The form of interest-bearing capital is responsible for the fact that every
definite and regular money revenue appears as interest on some capital,
whether it arises from some capital or not. The money income is first con-
verted into interest, and from the interest one can determine the capital
from which it arises.” In this paragraph Marx describes mental processes
that turn various things into capital and are responsible for the fact that in
the mind of actors “all connection with the actual expansion process of
capital is thus completely lost, and the conception of capital as something
with automatic self-expansion properties is thereby strengthened” (Marx
1974b, 466). According to his analysis, the domination of capital gives
rise to specific modes of thought that produce not only a naturalization
but also a multiplication of capital forms: “With the development of
interest-­bearing capital and the credit system, all capital seems to double
itself, and sometimes treble itself, by the various modes in which the same
capital, or perhaps even the same claim on a debt, appears in different
forms in different hands” (Marx 1974b, 470). As examples for this ficti-
tious capital, Marx (1974b, 464–465) mentions stock options and gov-
ernment debt as well as labour power.
Through Marxian lens it is perhaps no coincidence that the triumph of
human capital theory—which holds that human labour is a form of capi-
tal—and the reassertion of the agency and power of international finance
capital—or interest-bearing capital in Marx’s terminology—occurred
simultaneously during the last third of the twentieth century. At the same
period, Bourdieu drafted his capital theory, which has been widely echoed
in sociology and related disciplines. In my view, this is rather troublesome
from the point of view of economic critique. To conceive of human capac-
ities and social relations as capital—and of oneself as a human capitalist or
as an entrepreneur of oneself—is completely in line with the zeitgeist of
contemporary capitalism. Therefore, Bourdieu’s critical note on “some
particularly intrepid economists, like Gary Becker,” the American Nobel
Laureate human capital theorist, might also be said to strike a chord in
194  P. STRECKEISEN

relation to himself: insofar as it multiplies the forms of capital without

analysing the social value forms making capital possible, Bourdieu’s theory
reproduces current trends of the capitalist economy and can be considered
as its “unreflected product” (Bourdieu 2005, 6–7) just like Becker’s. No
doubt in this respect Bourdieu should be criticized with Bourdieu because
his analogy between the forms of capital omitting a deeper analysis of eco-
nomic capital turns out to be a “mimetic model” that confuses similarity
and analogy, whereas it is necessary to construct “analogical models aimed
at apprehending the hidden principles of the realities they interpret”
(Bourdieu et al. 1991, 53).

Reflexive Eclecticism
In an interview on Max Weber, Bourdieu describes his sociology as an
engagement in “reflexive eclecticism” and he adds: “For me, it is not nec-
essarily a contradiction to ‘borrow’ stuff from everywhere: from Marx to
Durkheim via Weber, as long as all this leads to a certain theoretical coher-
ence, which nowadays is castigated as ‘totalitarian’ by the postmodernists”
(Bourdieu et  al. 2011, 118). Bourdieu’s posture towards classical texts
also inspires my own approach to economic critique. It regards not only
the combining of various sources of inspiration but also about the attitude
towards each one of them.

I believe that it is possible to think with a thinker and to think, at the same
time, against him or her. This means that, in a radical way, we have to chal-
lenge the classificatory, and hence political, logic in which—almost every-
where—relations with the thoughts of the past are established. ‘For Marx’,
as Althusser wanted it to be, or ‘against Marx’. I am convinced that it is
possible to think with Marx against Marx, or with Durkheim against
Durkheim; and surely also with Marx and Durkheim against Weber and vice
versa. (Bourdieu et al. 2011, 114)

Bourdieu’s writings show that theoretical work does not become apo-
litical when it refuses naive submission to political logic. And, yes of
course, we shall also think with Bourdieu against Bourdieu: For instance,
we can pick up his theory of praxis and criticize his capital theory in the
meantime. There is no need to either align completely with Bourdieu or
to reject his approach altogether.
 8  PRACTICE AND FORM: ECONOMIC CRITIQUE WITH MARX AND BOURDIEU  195

This contribution holds that Marx and Bourdieu invented two original
approaches to economic critique. Both operate on all three levels of cri-
tique: They develop an analysis of the economy as a social system, establish
a categorical critique of economic theory, and carry forward a broader
reflection on the relationship between the economy as a social system on
one side and as an academic discipline on the other. These two approaches
can be combined for the purpose of further advancing economic critique.
Bourdieu has taken up and refined the young Marx’s theory of practice,
which, given the fact that economic orthodoxy today is a behavioural sci-
ence in the first place, might be the best that could be developed starting
with Marx’s early writings in terms of economic critique. But Marx and
Bourdieu must not and cannot be harmoniously united, as I have indi-
cated referring to capital theory. Reflexive eclecticism does not produce
theoretical reconciliation, it aims at inspiration and critique instead. It has
nothing to do with the “architectonic reason” that expresses itself, for
example, in the vast collections produced by medieval theologians compil-
ing all the important arguments developed by the Church Fathers during
the ages. (Functional equivalents can easily be found in the Marxist tradi-
tion). Contrary to that, reflexive eclecticism is guided by the principle of
“polemical reason.” It excludes theoretical concessions and retains from
its sources only “that which it has criticized” according to the French phi-
losopher of science Gaston Bachelard quoted by Bourdieu et  al.
(1991, 27–28).
Of course, Marx and Bourdieu are not the only two theoretical inspira-
tions for today’s economic critique. All available sources of critique can be
mobilized against economic imperialism, without giving up the claim to
theoretical coherence. At the same time, there is no reason to think that
critical economics and economic critique are unable to inspire each other:
For critical economics, economic critique can act as a thorn in the flesh
that spurs it on in its critique of orthodoxy, as well as an opportunity for
alliances beyond the economic field that might influence the balance of
power in the field. For economic critique on the other hand, critical eco-
nomics can be inspiring because it is more familiar with the economic field
and can help formulate the relevant questions instead of missing the mark.
Undoubtedly, however, a fruitful collaboration presupposes that both
sides recognize the difference between their social positions—inside versus
outside the field of economic science, respectively—and are willing to dis-
cuss the inevitable theoretical divergences with this awareness always
in mind.
196  P. STRECKEISEN

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 CHAPTER 9

Does Bourdieu “Extend” Marx’s Concept

of Capital?

Mathieu Hikaru Desan

Introduction
Although Bourdieu was clearly a close and appreciative reader of Marx, his
relationship to Marxism  was fraught and ambivalent.1 In this chapter, I
consider one particularly common interpretation of Bourdieu’s relation-
ship to Marxism: that he transcends Marxism’s narrow economism by
extending its critical problematic beyond the economic sphere and into
the cultural and symbolic spheres. I look specifically at the concept of capi-
tal, which is central to both Bourdieu and Marx, and whose cultural and
symbolic forms in Bourdieusian theory mark that theory’s originality and
constitute the basis for the perception that Bourdieu extends Marxism. I
argue that this model of extension must ultimately be rejected. Bourdieu’s
concepts of cultural and symbolic capital are not extensions of an

1
 This chapter is an edited version of Desan (2013).

M. H. Desan (*)
University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
e-mail: mathieu.desan@colorado.edu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 199

Switzerland AG 2022
G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and
Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_9
200  M. H. DESAN

economic capital conceived in a Marxist sense, and the concept of eco-

nomic capital of which the other capitals are extended forms is not Marxist.
I end with a discussion of Bourdieu’s treatment of the economic sphere,
which constitutes a kind of empty referent in his theory of capital. I show
how, inconsistent with the critical epistemology that characterizes his soci-
ology of culture, Bourdieu has a tendency to treat economic phenomena,
including economic capital, as self-evident. I compare this unfavourably to
Marx’s concept of capital, the point of which was to theoretically recon-
struct the social and historical relations of exploitation that fetishized eco-
nomic practices concealed. I conclude that we must not only reject the
idea that Bourdieu extended Marx’s analysis of capital into non-economic
spheres of practice, but also the notion that through this extension
Bourdieu transcended the economism that Marxism is (falsely) thought to
represent.

The Extension Model

A particularly persistent interpretation of Bourdieu’s relation to Marxism
is that he extends Marxism’s critical problematic to the cultural and sym-
bolic spheres, thereby transcending its narrow economism. So, for exam-
ple, according to Swartz, “the first way Bourdieu distances himself from
Marxism is by extending the notion of economic interest to ostensibly
noneconomic goods and services” (1997: 66). The second way, Swartz
goes on, “is by extending the idea of capital to all forms of power, whether
they be material, cultural, social, or symbolic” (p. 73). More recently, Joas
and Knöbl have written that the particular way in which Bourdieu devel-
ops his theory

does not entail a complete break with utilitarian or Marxian notions …

Bourdieu deploys the term ‘capital’, which originates in ‘bourgeois’ and
Marxian economics, but he extends its meaning and distinguishes between
different forms of capital. (2009: 385)

In the same vein, Paulle, van Heerikhuizen, and Emirbayer have claimed
that Bourdieu “tried to escape from … Marxist ‘economism’ by adding to
the classical concept of economic capital other types of capital: cultural,
social, and symbolic types of assets being the most noteworthy” (2011:
161). Fowler goes so far as to argue that Bourdieu “effectively operates
within the Marxist tradition” and that he “neither abandons the Marxist
 9  DOES BOURDIEU “EXTEND” MARX’S CONCEPT OF CAPITAL?  201

method of historical materialism ... nor repudiates Marx’s own texts”

(2011: 33–5). She claims that Bourdieu “provides his most powerful cri-
tique of orthodox Marxism ... by taking up and extending Marx’s own
analytical instruments to great sociological effect” (p.  36). Indeed, she
praises Bourdieu for drawing attention to “misrecognized or misunder-
stood features of social action, particularly those that function analogously
to the extraction of surplus value in the labour process” (p. 34). To be fair,
these interpretations roughly correspond with how Bourdieu understood
his own relation to Marxism. His frequent use of Weber, for example, was
not meant to negate Marxism entirely, but rather to “close one of the gaps
in Marxism” by elaborating a “materialist theory of the ‘symbolic’”
(Bourdieu, Schultheis, and Pfeuffer 2011: 115–116).
In evaluating the claim that Bourdieu’s “general theory of the economy
of practices” extends or generalizes the Marxist problematic and thereby
transcends its economistic distortions, it is helpful to examine Marx’s and
Bourdieu’s concepts of capital. Not only is capital the conceptual glue
holding Bourdieu’s “general theory of the economy of practices” together,
it is also an obvious point of terminological convergence between Marxism
and Bourdieu. If Bourdieu does in fact extend Marxism, then one might
expect this to be especially the case in his theory of the different forms of
capital. Indeed, this extension is precisely what Bourdieu seems to suggest,
albeit in an ultimately problematic way.

The Marxian Concept of Capital

It is easy to forget that Marx himself conceived of his project as a critique
of political economy. This seems to have eluded even Bourdieu, who,
although sympathetic to Marx in some ways, often criticized Marxism for
its supposed economism (e.g. 1987, 1998, 2015). Bourdieu even claimed
that Marxism was “the most economistic tradition that we know”
(Bourdieu and Eagleton 1992: 114). But how fair is this charge?
In fact, it was Marx’s project to criticize the self-evidence of political
economy’s fetishized categories and to demonstrate how “a world’s his-
tory” was implicated in them (1977: 274). Indeed, the theoretical impasse
presented by capitalist circulation, which appears as “the exclusive realm of
Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham,” is precisely what Marx’s con-
cept of capital was meant to overcome (p.  280). The main contours of
Marx’s theory of capital are well known. The fetishized experience of eco-
nomic production and exchange conceals capital’s essence as a social
202  M. H. DESAN

relation of exploitation. Only by constructing a theoretical concept of

capital that broke from this fetishized experience was Marx able to show,
first, that the valorization process only exists in and through the concrete
labour process and, second, that the production of surplus-value is a his-
torically specific form of extracting surplus-labour from direct producers.
Moreover, for Marx capital is doubly social in that it entails in the first
instance a social relation of exploitation, and in the second instance the
totality of social relations that reproduce this fundamental relation’s con-
ditions of possibility. Class struggles are not struggles over capital but
struggles within it. What this indicates is that the relation of exploitation
that capital denotes is overdetermined by the various instances in the social
structure as a whole. The concept of capital thus does not refer exclusively
to the “economic” sphere. In fact, Marx’s point is to demonstrate how
even apparently straightforwardly “economic” phenomena are constitu-
tively social, political, and historical. So whereas capital may appear here as
money and there as means of production, Marx’s concept of capital allows
us to pierce this fetishized form and to see capital not as a thing, but as a
process; and not just a process, but a process of exploitation; and, finally,
not only a process of exploitation, but also a social totality.

Bourdieu’s New Capitals

Bourdieu rejects the philosophical-anthropological foundations of econo-
mism while at the same time demonstrating the interestedness of suppos-
edly disinterested fields of practice. The dynamics of power are not,
according to Bourdieu, limited to the economic sphere but pervade the
cultural and symbolic spheres as well. The theory of economic practices is
thus only “a particular case of a general theory of the economy of prac-
tices” (1990: 122). It is as part of this general theory that Bourdieu devel-
ops his notion of the different forms of capital. Bourdieu attempts to break
from the common-sense experience of capital as “economic” and demon-
strate instead how the power dynamics designated by the term capital are
also operative in non-economic spheres of social life, albeit in misrecog-
nized forms. As Lebaron (2003) and Heilbron (2011) point out,
Bourdieu’s importation of economistic language in extending the concept
of capital to culture, far from implying a kind of economic reductionism,
was intended as a sort of epistemological shock challenging both the
enchanted view of culture as disinterested and the economistic view that
sees all power and interest as ultimately economic. Like Marx, then,
 9  DOES BOURDIEU “EXTEND” MARX’S CONCEPT OF CAPITAL?  203

Bourdieu seems to be sharply critical of economism’s fetishized concep-

tions of capital, and fully committed to an understanding of it that high-
lights its social and historical quality. A close reading of his concept of
capital, however, reveals a more ambiguous picture.
Consider the concept of cultural capital. Used for the first time in 1966
(Bourdieu 1966), the concept was developed by Bourdieu (with various
collaborators) during his research in the 1960s on the relationship between
education, cultural reproduction, and social reproduction, which resulted
in the publication of Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture
(1977), co-written with Jean-Claude Passeron. In this work, the concept
of cultural capital is not conceived as an objective principle of stratifica-
tion. It is not a resource that confers power upon its holder. Rather, it is
an effect of power, a sort of shorthand for the set of competencies specific
to the dominant class which become misrecognized as objective resources.
There are two moments of misrecognition in the process of reproduction.
The first is that the unequal distribution of cultural capital is misrecog-
nized as unequal merit, objectified in academic credentials. The second,
which actually precedes the first and without which cultural reproduction
could not contribute to social reproduction, is that the concept of cultural
capital itself is already a class power misrecognized as a bundle of objective
properties. Cultural capital is the name given to the dominant class habitus
when it is apprehended symbolically within the context of a relation of
class power. Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital is here far from being a
fetishized category. It implies, as a condition of its own existence, an
understanding of the production and reproduction of class relations.
Consequently, if conceived as a theory of ideology and legitimation, it is
compatible with—if not an extension of—a Marxist theory of class exploi-
tation and the reproduction of the relations of production.2
But why call it cultural capital? Reproduction suggests a more or less
metaphorical usage of the term. Cultural capital is profitable in the sense
that it is a kind of self-expanding cultural recognition. But there is not yet
a notion of capital as such, or economic capital, to which cultural capital is
conceptually linked. What process is denoted by the term capital, and why
the set of cultural privileges designated as cultural capital should specifi-
cally be considered capital, remains largely unspecified.
This changes with Distinction (1984). There Bourdieu’s understanding
of the social order and the places of class and capital within it changes

2
 Jacques Bidet and Anne Bailey (1979) make a similar point.
204  M. H. DESAN

significantly. Cultural and economic capital are now construed as objective

categories of analysis that, rather than presupposing a theory of class, con-
stitute it.3 Capital becomes a principle of differentiation within a scientifi-
cally constructed social space, and classes refer above all to proximities in
this space effected by similar endowments of capital.
The difference with Reproduction is clear. Earlier, the entire analysis
presupposed an unspecified relation of class power. The concept of cul-
tural capital did not really belong to the social space as an objective prin-
ciple of differentiation. Rather, it was the symbolically misrecognized
habitus of the dominant class. Following Distinction, Bourdieu recasts the
social space as a “multi-dimensional space that can be constructed empiri-
cally by discovering the main factors of differentiation which account for
the differences observed in a given social universe, or, in other words, by
discovering the powers or forms of capital which are or can become effi-
cient...in this particular universe” (Bourdieu 1987: 3–4). Capital steps for-
ward as a foundational concept. As a concept pertaining to the objectivist
moment of analysis that seeks to scientifically construct the space of socially
determinant positions, capital becomes the principal explanatory factor in
Distinction, determining both class and habitus and, through them,
agents’ position-takings in the symbolic space.
These changes are problematic from the point of view of Bourdieu’s
relationship to Marxism. The concept of capital remains undertheorized.
In Distinction unlike in Reproduction, Bourdieu relates economic and cul-
tural capital as two commensurable forms of something common such
that one can intelligibly speak of a total volume of capital. But what generic
understanding of capital authorizes this move? Bourdieu defines capital in
Distinction as “actually usable resources and powers” (Bourdieu 1984:
114). It seems, then, that capital is deployed in a rather capacious and
banal, or fetishized, sense, as a power-conferring or profit-generating
resource—hardly an “extension” of the Marxist concept of capital.
The conceptualization of class is also problematic from a Marxist point
of view. For Bourdieu, objective classes and their fractions are determined
by volume and composition of capital, and as such are essentially quantita-
tively defined constructs. But such a definition of class is analytically lim-
ited. The only relationship one can construct between classes so defined is
one between dominant and dominated. Such a notion of class gives no

3
 This is not to suggest that cultural capital is “objective” in an essentialist or substantialist
way for Bourdieu.
 9  DOES BOURDIEU “EXTEND” MARX’S CONCEPT OF CAPITAL?  205

indication of its historical conditions of possibility. One might wonder

what determines the distribution of effective capitals in the social space.
Answering this question requires a concept of class that goes beyond sim-
ply describing a given state of the distribution of effective resources.
Moreover, by redefining class broadly as a particular distribution of all
forms of capital effective within a social space, Bourdieu loses any theoreti-
cal traction for accounting for exploitation as a mode of power distinct
from domination or exclusion.4 In the social space, there are only “con-
tinuous distributions” (Bourdieu 1984: 175). It is hard to see how a social
space constructed in this way can render exploitation theoretically legible.
In Distinction and subsequent works, Bourdieu thus seems to limit the
points of possible convergence with a Marxist theory of class exploitation
and social reproduction that existed in Reproduction. The conceptual
commensuration of economic and cultural capital within a newly devel-
oped theory of the social space raises the question of the fundamental
social processes or relations that capital as such, whatever its form, denotes.
But far from even attempting to extend a Marxist problematic that would
define capital in terms of a socio-historical relation of class exploitation,
Bourdieu instead puts forth an undertheorized and fetishized notion of
capital.

Towards a Definition: The Forms of Capital

In “The Forms of Capital” (1986), Bourdieu attempts a rare systematic
formulation of his theory of the different forms of capital. I have already
noted how the common conceptual designation of cultural, social, and
economic capital as capital raises the question of their relation to each
other as different manifestations of the same social process. Here Bourdieu
explicitly addresses this question. But the way in which he does so is far
from satisfying, especially if one is expecting to find there a solid basis for
the claim that he extends or generalizes a Marxist theory of capital.
In the section on “conversions,” Bourdieu argues that “economic capi-
tal is at the root of all the other types of capital” and that these other capi-
tals are “transformed, disguised forms of economic capital” (p. 252). So
what is it that is common to the different forms of capital and that under-
lies their theoretical commensurability? Bourdieu defines the substance of
capital as “accumulated labor (in its materialized form or its

4
 See Erik Olin Wright (2009) for this distinction.
206  M. H. DESAN

‘incorporated,’ embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private,

i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appro-
priate social energy in the form of reified or living labor” (p. 241). As for
the measure of this substance, Bourdieu argues that “the universal equiva-
lent, the measure of all equivalences, is nothing other than labor-time”
(p. 253).
These passages of course evoke the labour theory of value and imply an
affinity between Bourdieu’s concept of capital and Marx’s. But a closer
reading suggests otherwise. For example, while Marx posits the theory of
value as a premise for establishing a condition of equal exchange between
commodities, it is not in itself a theory of capital. In fact, Marx shows how
the production of surplus-value is possible despite the fact that commodi-
ties exchange at their values. That labour is accumulated in things and that
those things become exchangeable according to the amount of labour
accumulated is merely descriptive of commodities. Capital entails a rela-
tion of exploitation that is not reducible to the circuit of commodity pro-
duction and exchange.
Consider also Bourdieu’s conception of profit. He says,

capital, in the sense of the means of appropriating the product of accumu-

lated labor in the objectified state which is held by a given agent, depends
for its real efficacy on the form of the distribution of the means of appropri-
ating the accumulated and objectively available resources; and the relation-
ship of appropriation between an agent and the resources objectively
available, and hence the profits they produce, is mediated by the relationship
of (objective and/or subjective) competition between himself and the other
possessors of capital competing for the same goods, in which scarcity—and
through it social value—is generated. The structure of the field, i.e., the
unequal distribution of capital, is the source of the specific effects of capital,
i.e., the appropriation of profits and the power to impose the laws of func-
tioning of the field most favorable to capital and its reproduction.
(pp. 245–246)

There are two competing principles of value here. On the one hand,
labour-time is the “measure of all equivalences” and is the principle that
determines the exchangeability of the different capitals. But on the other
hand, inasmuch as Bourdieu is interested in accounting for the profitabil-
ity of capital, its value is determined by its scarcity. Bourdieu here seems to
 9  DOES BOURDIEU “EXTEND” MARX’S CONCEPT OF CAPITAL?  207

be confronted by the same problem that confronted classical political

economy: namely, how to account for profits when assuming that things
exchange at their equivalents? Marx’s solution to this problem was to
develop a concept of the relations of production as relations of exploita-
tion. But Bourdieu, like those political economists criticized by Marx,
assimilates profits entirely to the sphere of circulation, which forces him to
either abandon the assumption of equal exchange or to accept a notion of
self-valorizing value.
For Bourdieu, insofar as the different forms of capital are considered
only in their dimension as embodiments of accumulated labour, they are
commodities. But what defines capital as capital for Bourdieu is not its
nature as accumulated labour, but its exclusive appropriation and subse-
quent investment as a weapon and a stake within a field. In other words,
commodities become capital insofar as they are put to profitable use. But
profit, for Bourdieu, has little to do with production. It is a closure effect,
that is, a consequence of the leverage entailed by exclusive appropriation.
As such, it belongs entirely to the sphere of circulation.
From a Marxist perspective, while Bourdieu’s concept of profit might
account for the struggle over the distribution of the available surplus-­
value, it cannot account for its production in the first place. Bourdieu’s
invocation of a marxisant theory of value thus does not actually shed any
light on his theory of profit. For Bourdieu, the profitability of any given
commodity is completely independent of both the relations of production
and the concrete labour process within which it is produced. So whereas
for Marx capital denotes the social relation of exploitation—that is, the
extraction of surplus-labour—in the production of commodities, for
Bourdieu capital designates an object that, due to its unequal distribution
within a field, is capable of accruing benefits to its owner. Hence Bourdieu
often speaks of the exploitation of capital, and not the social relation of
exploitation denoted by capital.
Following Craig Calhoun (1993) we could say that what Bourdieu’s
theory ultimately lacks is an idea of capitalism. Bourdieu’s generic concept
of capital is transhistorical. As Calhoun notes, by capital Bourdieu seems
to mean simply any resource insofar as it yields power (p. 69). In the end,
what Bourdieu’s notion of capital lacks is not only an idea of capitalism as
a particular historical formation, but more fundamentally an idea of exploi-
tation as a particular form of power.
208  M. H. DESAN

Capital, Exploitation, and the Economic Field:

The Limits of Bourdieu’s Critical Sociology
Bourdieu’s theory of the different forms of capital has as its reference
point a concept of economic capital, just as the economic field of inter-
ested action is the reference point for his “general science of the economy
of practices.” It would thus seem necessary to understand the role that
capital plays in the economic field. But Bourdieu rarely attempted to
define economic capital, saying that he did not want to “dwell on the
notion of economic capital,” and suggesting that “it’s not [his] area”
(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 119; Bourdieu 1993: 32). This abdica-
tion of conceptual definition is surprising. A Marxist conception of capital
has sometimes been projected into this void, but as I have suggested, this
is a dubious assumption. Rather, this absence is indicative of a critical
weakness in Bourdieu: he sometimes takes the economic field at face value,
and as such grasps capital only in the fetishized form in which it appears in
this field. Marx constructed a concept of capital precisely to demonstrate
its constitutively historical and social character and to render legible the
relations of exploitation presupposed yet concealed  by its reified form.
Bourdieu’s theory of capital has been praised for extending the scope of
the concept beyond the economic field, but what it extends is not a Marxist
concept of capital, but only capital’s appearance as a power resource.
Bourdieu insists on calling these different power resources “capital” with-
out developing a concept of capital as such, and thereby obscures the rela-
tions of exploitation which Marx revealed.
How does Bourdieu conceptualize the “economic” sphere? According
to Bourdieu, “archaic” societies euphemize the objective facts of interest,
competition, and exploitation by transmuting these practices into a sym-
bolic “good faith” economy. But the necessity for such symbolic dissimu-
lation is, Bourdieu suggests, historically specific:

If it be true that symbolic violence is the gentle, hidden form which violence
takes when overt violence is impossible, it is understandable why symbolic
forms of domination should have progressively withered away as objective
mechanisms came to be constituted which, in rendering superfluous the
work of euphemization, tended to produce the “disenchanted” dispositions
their development demanded. (1977: 196)
 9  DOES BOURDIEU “EXTEND” MARX’S CONCEPT OF CAPITAL?  209

This process of disenchantment corresponds to the historical constitu-

tion of the economy as an economy, free from the work of euphemization
and dissimulation. Indeed, Bourdieu argues that “only at the end of a slow
evolution tending to strip away the specifically symbolic aspect of the acts
and relations of production was the economy able to constitute itself as
such, in the objectivity of a separate universe, governed by its own rules,
those of self-interested calculation, competition, and exploitation” (2000:
19). A universe is thus established “in which the law of exchange of exact
equivalents becomes the explicit rule and can be expressed publicly, in an
almost cynical manner” (1998: 105). There “one can call a spade a spade,
an interest an interest, a profit a profit. Gone is the work of euphemization
which, among the Kabyle, was imposed even on the market” (p.  105).
The emergence of the economic field thus:

marks the appearance of a universe in which social agents can admit to them-
selves and admit publicly that they have interests and can tear themselves
away from collective misrecognition; a universe in which they not only can
do business, but can also admit to themselves that they are there to do busi-
ness, that is, to conduct themselves in a self-interested manner, to calculate,
make a profit, accumulate, and exploit. (pp. 105–106)

Bourdieu here seems content to take the economic field at face value.
While the symbolic order dissimulates the economic field, the economic
field is supposedly an arena free from any misrecognition. Marx, of course,
showed that it was precisely the fetishized experience of the economy as
such that was, in the first place, ideological. The whole point of Marx’s
concept of capital was to give the lie to the notion that in the economic
field of circulation everything appears as it really is, that profit and exploi-
tation are immediately available to experience.
In the passages above, Bourdieu, unlike Marx, locates equal exchange,
profits, and exploitation on the same experiential plane and refuses to rec-
ognize the truth of these in a different analytical space. While the eco-
nomic field is conceived in some sense as the truth of the cultural and
symbolic fields, the truth of the economic field is apparently found within
itself, on its surface.
This is not to argue that Bourdieu always took the economic field at
face value (e.g. Bourdieu 2005). Yet Bourdieu was rather inconsistent in
his characterization of the economic field. So while his study of the hous-
ing market is exemplary of what a critical sociology of the economy might
210  M. H. DESAN

look like, when it comes to theorizing the place of interests, profit, exploi-
tation, and hence capital, in the economic field, Bourdieu too readily sus-
pends his critical epistemology. Whereas the importation of terms such as
capital from the economic to the cultural sphere was meant to provoke an
epistemological break with an enchanted view of culture, in elaborating a
critique of economic reason Bourdieu is often content only to historicize
economic practices whose disenchanted nature he accepts. Telling in this
regard have been the responses to the critique of Bourdieu as a closet utili-
tarian and economic reductionist (Caillé 1981; Favereau 2001). Bourdieu’s
defenders, including Bourdieu himself, have responded to this charge by
rejecting any foundationalist anthropology and pointing out that interests
and practices are the socio-historical products of specific fields (Bourdieu
and Wacquant 1992; Boyer 2003; Convert 2003; Lebaron 2003). But
even if we accept that Bourdieu was neither essentialist nor reductionist, it
remains the case that within advanced societies the economic sphere is
held up as a space wherein the logic of power is uniquely transparent. So
while in pre-capitalist or symbolic worlds the (economic) truth of practices
and the experience of those practices do not coincide, the “instituted cyni-
cism” of the economic economy “means that in this case the boundary
between the native representation and the scientific description is less
marked” (Bourdieu 2005: 200).
The kinds of critique to which Bourdieu subjects the non-economic
and economic spheres are thus subtly different. Whereas his critical sociol-
ogy generally consists in theoretically unmasking the hidden logic of
power within cultural fields, Bourdieu implies that for the economy, where
science and native experience coincide, critique consists only in historiciz-
ing its already transparent logic. Power being transparent in the economy,
critical sociology is left without an object and gives way to economic
anthropology. Consequently, phenomena such as exploitation are con-
ceived not as the dissimulated structural relations of capitalist production,
but rather as dispositional features, albeit historically contingent, of eco-
nomic actors.
Consider the more programmatic sections of The Social Structures of the
Economy. In the introduction Bourdieu writes that, “against the ahistorical
vision of economics,” we must reconstitute the history of the genesis of
economic dispositions on the one hand and the economic field on the
other (2005: 5). But once this economic field is constituted:
 9  DOES BOURDIEU “EXTEND” MARX’S CONCEPT OF CAPITAL?  211

in a kind of confession to itself, capitalist society stops ‘deluding itself with

dreams of disinterestedness and generosity’: registering an awareness, as it
were, that it has an economy, it constitutes the acts of production, exchange
or exploitation as ‘economic’, recognizing explicitly as such the economic
ends by which these things have been guided. (p. 7)

The “economy” is here equated with economic “ends.” The question

of exploitation is reduced to one of intention, that is, of the genesis of a
disposition to exploit. Bourdieu may historicize this disposition to exploit,
but the objective relation of exploitation is not in itself considered a theo-
retical object, presumably because it is transparent in the economic field.
Bourdieu assimilates all “economic” phenomena—profit, exploitation,
accumulation—to an economic field considered only in its dimension as a
sphere of circulation and exchange, and wherein the truth of these phe-
nomena is immediately given to experience.
Where exploitation is transparent, capital has no secrets to betray. For
Bourdieu, economic capital has an objective existence in the social space
and serves as a reference point for all other capitals—that is, as a universal
equivalent. But Bourdieu does not consider, as Marx did, that this objec-
tive economic capital is itself symbolic in that it denotes a social relation of
exploitation. Capital is taken for granted within a taken-for-granted eco-
nomic field. Whereas capital in the cultural and symbolic orders is dissimu-
lated, in the economic field capital, like profits and exploitation, can be
admitted as such and hence does not require a conceptual definition sepa-
rate from the way in which it appears to native experience. In Bourdieu’s
rendering, economic capital as such denotes only a commodity or a
resource insofar as it is struggled over within a transparent economic field.
He has little to say about the appropriation of surplus-labour and the
social and historical relations that make it possible. And although Bourdieu
is sensitive to class conflict, this conflict is typically treated as a conflict over
the distribution of capital, or as a conflict between the holders of different
capitals.
Whatever the virtues of Bourdieu’s (1987, 2013) reconceptualization
of class, its capaciousness in including within the category any and all
potential processes of group-formation based on the distribution of mul-
tiple capitals is in this instance a liability. Bourdieu is off the mark in criti-
cizing the Marxist concept of class for restricting itself to the relations of
production (1985: 736). The particularity of the Marxist concept lies not
in some economistic bias that dismisses all other collectivities and forms of
212  M. H. DESAN

power; rather, it lies in the particularity of the form of power, that is,
exploitation as the historically variable form of appropriating surplus-­
labour from the direct producers, that it seeks to render legible. This is lost
on Bourdieu, who in broadening the concept of class loses sight of the
qualitatively different relations of power that characterize the relations
between differently constructed groups. For Bourdieu, exploitation has
no distinct conceptual content.
In the end, Bourdieu’s notions of capital and class remain firmly within
a Weberian problematic of social closure and its distributional effects.
Marx is not even met, much less transcended.

Conclusion
The merits of Bourdieusian sociology are clear. I do not claim that any
rapprochement between Bourdieusian theory and Marxism is doomed
from the start, nor do I claim that it is impossible for one to build off the
other. Indeed, for Marxism to have a future it must recognize its explana-
tory limits and open itself up to the best that sociology has to offer.
Likewise, for Bourdieusian sociology to be true to its critical vocation it
must take Marxism more seriously than it has in the past.
Any future rapprochement between Bourdieusian theory and Marxism
will have to think through the nature of their relation. My goal in this
chapter has been to evaluate one particular understanding of this relation:
that Bourdieu extends Marx’s critical analysis beyond the economy and
thereby transcends Marxism’s economism. I did this by looking at the
concept of capital, which has been the most obvious point of potential
convergence between Marx and Bourdieu.
Two conclusions impose themselves. First, if the different forms of cap-
ital are but extended forms of economic capital, the notion of economic
capital that they extend is not a Marxist one. Nowhere does Bourdieu
define capital as a historically specific mode of extracting and appropriat-
ing surplus-labour, nor is it clear what extending such a notion of capital
to the disparate phenomena designated by cultural, social, and symbolic
capital would mean. Second, the claim that Bourdieu transcends Marxism’s
economism by extending a concept of capital is dubious for the reasons
that Marx’s concept of capital was never economistic in that it always
denoted an overdetermined socio-historical relation of exploitation, and
that what Bourdieu supposedly extends is a conception of economic
 9  DOES BOURDIEU “EXTEND” MARX’S CONCEPT OF CAPITAL?  213

capital that, because grasped only in its fetishized form, is itself marked by
an economistic belief in the transparency of economic experience.
It is possible, however, to think of the relation between Marx and
Bourdieu differently. Rather than positing a relation of extension, the
search for possible points of articulation between Bourdieusian sociology
and Marxism seems a more fruitful approach. In the spirit of theoretical
pluralism, the question should not be about who transcends or surpasses
whom, but about what processes each approach can uniquely render leg-
ible and how these theories can be used together in such ways that better
explain concrete social phenomena. Still, a commitment to pluralism
should not gloss over problems in compatibility where they do exist.
Bourdieu’s notion of capital became less compatible with Marx’s precisely
as it sought to subsume different principles of power under a single con-
cept. In order to bring Marx and Bourdieu together, then, it might be
necessary to loosen the screws a bit on the totalizing project of a “general
theory of the economy of practices.”

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 CHAPTER 10

Reassessing Bourdieu’s Use of the Marxian

Concept of Capital

Miriam Aiello

Introduction
The aim of this chapter is to analyse the significance of Bourdieu’s concept
of capital and discuss whether this concept is coherent with the Marxian
notion of capital or not.
Even though in this regard most interpreters subscribe to the “exten-
sion model” (Desan 2013: 319; see also Desan’s chapter in this book)—
that is, to the idea that Bourdieu simply extended the Marxian notion of
capital with the aim either of generalising Marxism to non-economic
dimensions (Fowler 2011: 34-35; Joas and Knöbl 2011: 15) or of criticis-
ing Marxian economism (Brubaker 1985: 748; Swartz 1997: 66; Paulle
et al. 2011: 161)—there are indeed four main objections raised by several
scholars who claim that Bourdieu’s notion of capital is far from being
genuinely Marxian: (1) the ‘substantialist’ objection (Krais and Gebauer
2002; Bidet 2008: 589; Desan 2013) according to which Bourdieusian
capital fails to be a process; (2) the ‘circulationist’ objection (Desan 2013:

M. Aiello (*)
Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy
e-mail: miriam.aiello@uniroma3.it

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 217

Switzerland AG 2022
G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and
Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_10
218  M. AIELLO

332; Beasley-Murray 2000) according to which Bourdieu not only mis-

takes the labour theory of value for that of the capital as a value in process
but also places capital on the ground of the circulation of commodities
rather than on the ground of production; (3) the ‘missing exploitation’
objection (Desan 2013; Beasley-Murray 2000: 101) according to which
Bourdieusian capital does not encompass the exploitation that necessarily
qualifies the Marxian concept (cf. Swartz 1997: 75; Santoro 2016: 71);
(4) the ‘trans-historical’ objection (Calhoun 1993) according to which,
unlike Marx’s use of capital as a historically determined social relationship,
Bourdieusian capital displays a trans-historical nature.
Against these critiques that deem Bourdieu’s capital almost entirely
inconsistent with Marx’s capital, claiming it falls under a generic non-­
Marxian conception of capital, I defend the thesis of a partial congru-
ence. The demonstration of this thesis requires a comparison between
Bourdieu’s and Marx’s concepts of capital based not only on volume I
but also on volumes II and III of Das Kapital and on the 1857
Introduction [Einleitung] to Grundrisse (Marx 1973). Taking into
account Bourdieu’s ‘holistic’ tenet, and thus considering the interrela-
tions between habitus, field, and capital I begin by providing a concep-
tual reconstruction of capital in Bourdieu’s Forms of Capital, and in
Marx’s Das Kapital. I then illustrate the twofold theoretical operation
that justifies Bourdieu’s appropriation of the notion of capital within a
“general economy of practices” and I reassess the conditions under
which Bourdieu’s capital is—on its specific ground—comparable to
Marx’s capital. Here I argue that Bourdieu’s concept of capital occupies
an intermediate place between Marx’s account of capital as a social rela-
tion and a generic economic definition of capital as produced means of
production and as accumulated amount of money that yields or can yield
profit (cf. Lunghini 1991; Grenfell 2014: 145). Then, I illustrate the
four main objections mentioned above and put forward four corre-
sponding counter-objections aimed at supporting the thesis of a partial
congruence. I suggest (1) that the ‘holistic’ tenet neutralises the ‘sub-
stantialist’ objection; (2) that extending the analysis to volume II of Das
Kapital weakens the ‘circulationist’ objection; (3) that the theory of
symbolic violence—insofar as it implies the cognitive exploitation of
dominated agents—is a surrogate for the exploitation of labour-power at
issue in the ‘missing exploitation’ objection; and finally 4) that, against
the ‘trans-historical’ objection, the Marxian analysis of “production in
general” as a “rational abstraction [verständige Abstraktion]” (Marx
 10  REASSESSING BOURDIEU’S USE OF THE MARXIAN CONCEPT OF CAPITAL  219

1973: 85) sets a conceptual ground for a synergy between Bourdieu’s

trans-historical economy of practices and Marx’s analysis of the capitalist
mode of production.

Preliminary Remarks
It is well known that the Bourdieusian triad of habitus, field and capital is
made up entirely of notions borrowed, at least in their nominalistic shell,
from pre-existing traditions. Just as the habitus is borrowed from
Aristotelian-Thomistic ethics and the field is defined in the wake of Kurt
Lewin’s homologous psychosocial notion, so the capital theorised by
Bourdieu no doubt draws inspiration, in many fundamental respects, from
Karl Marx’s critique of political economy. Of course, it is also well known
that none of these notions reworked by Bourdieu are conceptually reduc-
ible to their “ancestor,” precisely because of their renovated structural and
explanatory function: in fact, in Bourdieu’s framework, the habitus no
longer performs the function of practical-moral balancing that qualifies
the Aristotelian hexis or Aquinas’s concept of habitus, the same way the
notion of field no longer coincides with the Lewinian one, that is, the
relationship of interdependence between the needs of the individual and
his or her physical and psychological environment. In much the same way,
the Bourdieusian concept of capital no longer denotes only a reality of a
strictly economic nature.
In addition to having to take into account the eccentricity of these con-
cepts with respect to their ancestry, any investigation into any of these
tools should also firmly bear in mind that Bourdieu always claimed both
their synergy and their empirically contextualised use (which I will hereaf-
ter call the “holistic tenet”): although each expresses, with their own focus
and slant, the objective and subjective objectivity of social phenomena,
only together are they able to fully restore social reality in its relational
form (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Habitus, field and capital in fact
constitute an integrated conceptual system, wherein each term expresses,
from a specific point of view—the corporeal-psychic internalisation of
experience (habitus), the structural exteriority of the space of experience
(field) and the cumulative acquisition (reified or incorporated) of experi-
ence as labour (capital)—the entire globality of the social whole and
its order.
Moreover, quite interestingly Bourdieu seems to reserve to capital a
different methodological treatment from that given to habitus and field:
220  M. AIELLO

possessed in a certain quantitative volume and qualitative configuration by

every agent and always presented in its manifold typologies (cultural,
social, symbolic, etc.), it seems the notion of capital is destined to concep-
tual fragmentation, essentially lacking the intrinsic cohesion and covari-
ance which qualify the notions of habitus and field, which are defined as
systems, respectively, of interdependent dispositions and positions.
And yet, despite such an irreducible plurality, capital, whether under-
stood as a substantive plurality or as a plurality of species, also exhibits a set
of characteristics that justifies the use of a common notion to denote it.
Thus there is an obvious lexical ambiguity: when one refers to ‘forms of
capital’ one is referring to ‘forms’ of a form, or we could say, going beyond
the pun, that forms of capital are—typological—instances of a functional
form that is present in each one of them, below their particularity, and that
precisely this is the form of capital. In other words, an overemphasis on
plurality risks overlooking the fact that capitals can figure as a plurality
only because they perform the same function and exhibit the same cluster
of salient features. As we shall see, Bourdieu’s conception of capital oscil-
lates between two fundamental meanings: according to the first one,
which is a nonspecific and asocial account, capital is only a produced means
of production; for the second one, which is the Marxian concept, capital
is a historically determined social relation of production, and is at once the
means, the end and the subject of the economic cycle.

“The Forms of Capital” and Capital as a Form

Even though Bourdieu employs the concept of capital already in his earlier
works (Bourdieu 1966), it is only in The Forms of Capital that he provides
(i) a justification for the use of the notion of capital in his social theory, (ii)
an analysis of the modes of existence of capital conducted through the
typification of its forms and states, and (iii) a theoretical-empirical outline
of capital conversion strategies.
For Bourdieu, capital is a function shared by all properties that have a
social existence and efficacy within a field of practice. Insofar as all social
properties have a historical nature—that is, insofar as their specific efficacy
and meaning are the product of an accumulation, within which the social
relations underlying this accumulation are implied—they function as capi-
tal; moreover, since in order to bring into existence their efficacy they
need to be invested in a field, they also constitute the means of accumula-
tion and of further valorisation.
 10  REASSESSING BOURDIEU’S USE OF THE MARXIAN CONCEPT OF CAPITAL  221

A first good reason to borrow the concept of capital is therefore that it

is able to restore the character of historicity to social reality, allowing to
grasp beneath the immediately perceived surface of an object—or of a
competence—its hidden history of production and attribution, a history
that always has a foundation in concrete social relations.
In this framework, “capital is accumulated labor, (in its materialized
form or its “incorporated,” embodied form)” (Bourdieu 1986: 241): cap-
ital is a crystallisation of social energy and of the social relations that
underpin its accumulation which, once privately acquired or inherited,
allows its owner to appropriate further social labour through its invest-
ment in a field. This voracious mobilising efficacy consists of two compo-
nents: in fact, capital is both “a vis insita, a force inscribed in objective or
subjective structures” and “a lex insita, the principle underlying the imma-
nent regularities of the social world” (Bourdieu 1986: 241). Thus capital
has both i) a physical character, as it is immanent energy capable of per-
forming work (and of putting to work what it subsumes), ii) and a nomo-
logical character, because its quantitative being, extensive and intensive,
governs the possibilities and impossibilities of its bearer.
By virtue of the first aspect, capital “contains a tendency to persist in its
being” (Bourdieu 1986: 241).1 This momentum, the “claim to exist”
(Bourdieu 1988b: 11) of a past history, is shared with the habitus, which
is enlivened by the tendency to survive the conditions of its own produc-
tion—as the effect of hysteresis makes evident. It would seem, therefore,
that this appetitive component of capital is the objective counterpart to
the appetitiveness of habitus, and of agents and groups as they are con-
structed in terms of habitus and classes of habitus.
By virtue of the second aspect, the restoration of the historicity of the
social world conveyed by capital forces us to recognise that not everything
is equally possible or impossible, probable or improbable, nor for every-
one: in every property that functions as capital there are social relations at
the basis of its acquisition, signification and evaluation, so that capital
already contains a relationship of force and domination that binds the pos-
sibilities of the bearer of capital in a particular way. For this reason, “the
structure of the distribution of the different types and subtypes of capital
at a given moment in time represents the immanent structure of the social

1
 Sometimes Bourdieu describes the class trajectories in terms of conatus and nisus perseve-
randi. See for example Bourdieu (1988a: 176) and Bourdieu (1984: 333). See also
Fuller (2008).
222  M. AIELLO

world, i.e., the set of constraints, inscribed in the very reality of that world,
which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the chances of
success for practices” (Bourdieu 1986: 242). To look at social reality with-
out the idea of capital implies falling into the fiction of a

universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world

without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired prop-
erties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one,
every soldier has a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and every prize can be
attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can
become anything. (Bourdieu 1986: 241)

On closer inspection, the critical disclosure of the gap between the

sphere of appearance and the sphere of essence is a key feature of Marx’s
critique of political economy. Indeed, Marx clearly showed the ambiva-
lence of capitalism as a product of Modernity: on the one hand, he stresses
how the capitalist market has become the scene of the peaceful encounter
among equal and free economic agents which are empowered to enter
into consensual acts and contracts of exchange according to the modern
principles of freedom and equality (“a very Eden of the innate rights of
man,” Marx 1976: 280). On the other hand, Marx points out that
Modernity has also brought forth that particular figure, unprecedented in
history and produced in a tragic and violent way by history itself, which is
the bearer of labour-power, the seller who has nothing to sell except his
own capacity to work, contained in his body and in his nerves. On the
commodity market, the buying and selling of labour-power appears fair
and free, while instead, in the process of production—wherein the labour-­
power is legitimately consumed—it gives birth to a surplus that exceeds
the amount of value exchanged in the buying and selling of that same
labour-power. The symmetry conceals an asymmetry: this is the critical
core of the Marxian critique of political economy.
A further fundamental point of Bourdieusian theory on capital is that
affirming the coextension of capital to all the properties that have a social
existence and efficacy in historically determined ways implies including in
the notion of capital a massive quantity of properties that do not have an
economic nature and do not appear as (immediately) convertible into
money. By virtue of this, recognising that not only economic properties
but also non-economic properties function as capital means affirming that
precisely those practices that present themselves as maximally disinterested
 10  REASSESSING BOURDIEU’S USE OF THE MARXIAN CONCEPT OF CAPITAL  223

are expressions of investment and, therefore, animated by specific forms of

non-economic interest.2 Indeed, Bourdieu says:

Interest, in the restricted sense it is given in economic theory, cannot be

produced without producing its negative counterpart, disinterestedness.
[…] The world of bourgeois man, with his double-entry accounting, cannot
be invented without producing the pure, perfect universe of the artist and
the intellectual and the gratuitous activities of art-for-art’s sake and pure
theory. (Bourdieu 1986: 242)

If Marx identified the juridical conditions of possibility—the principles

of equality and freedom—and the historical conditions of possibility—the
violence of primitive accumulation—of capitalism, Bourdieu identifies in
the constitution of the bourgeois market, and in the theoretical codifica-
tion of its functioning, the condition of possibility of the autonomisation
of the fields of disinterestedness (Bourdieu 2005: 7-10).
As for the issue of interest (Bourdieu 1988b),3 it is enough here to
recall that two fundamental principles lay at the basis of Bourdieu’s social
theory understood as a theory of action and knowledge: first, the classical
principle of sufficient reason, for which nothing happens without reason
and no action is carried out without a motivation; second, the principle of
opacity of knowledge, which underlies practical sense and the reasonable,
rather than rational, nature of action, for which such ‘motivations’ do not
require to be known transparently and successful action is most often not
guided either by rationality or by an explicit position of ends. The use of
the category of interest—and the close category of illusio as well—fits into
this epistemological framework: interest is opposed both to gratuitousness
and disinterestedness—that is, to what is without reason, unmotivated,
arbitrary—and to indifference—that is, the inability to detect differences
and to generate movement or differential activation states towards some-
thing. Interest or illusio consists in being caught up in a social game, “to
participate, to admit that the game is worth playing and that the stakes
created in and through the fact of playing are worth pursuing; it is to
recognize the game and to recognize the stakes” (Bourdieu 1998: 77).
Moreover, there are social contexts in which the masking of economic
interest is quintessential to defining non-economic interest. This is the

2
 Cf. Bourdieu (2013, 2017).
3
 See also Grenfell (2008) and, for a critical perspective, Caillé (1981, 1994).
224  M. AIELLO

case for either the precapitalist economy of symbolic exchanges or the

fields of disinterestedness in modern societies (art, culture, etc.), which are
driven by specific forms of “interest in disinterestedness” (Bourdieu 1998:
85), at the basis of which “denial (Verneinung)” and “euphemization”
(Bourdieu 1986: 242–243) of any economic interest are brought into play.
Whereas these considerations just count as general theoretical outlines,
perhaps Bourdieu’s best-known reflection on capital concerns the “forms”
it takes in social reality. Bourdieu maps out the different modes of exis-
tence of the properties that function as capital within two transversal dis-
tinctions: a typological distinction and a ‘topological’ one. The first states
that the multiple realities and properties capable of functioning as a capital
nexus can be grouped into three proper types—economic, cultural, and
social capital, and in a fourth meta-type—the symbolic capital. According
to the second distinction, these realities can be either objectified—enclosed
within the material boundaries of concrete objects or assets, or incorpo-
rated—included in the biological limits of the bearer in the form of cogni-
tive contents and postures –, or institutionalised—expressed by symbols,
credentials, guarantees and any kind of certifications capable of being valid
intersubjectively. It is worth noting that Marx is not unconcerned with
these distinctions (when, for example, he distinguishes between constant
and variable capital, and when he illustrates the ways in which the multiple
forms of capital circulate and change into one another).
By virtue of these two specifications, capital—as social energy, as cryst-
allised physical or cognitive social labour that expresses the social relations
of production and reproduction of the economic and symbolic order in
which it operates—can be:

• economic capital: in the objectified state when it consists of all mate-

rial, monetary and financial, movable and immovable assets; in the
institutionalised state when it consists of “property rights” (Bourdieu
1986: 243), and any other kind of contractual and institutional pro-
tection of an objectified economic capital;4
• cultural capital: in the embodied state when it consists of skills,
knowledge incorporated through family upbringing, education and

4
 While not appearing explicitly, it would not be improper to also speak of embodied eco-
nomic capital to denote those organic and aesthetic states of the body that are directly related
to the availability of economic capital, to the possibility of presenting and preserving it in
certain ways through the investment of economic capital.
 10  REASSESSING BOURDIEU’S USE OF THE MARXIAN CONCEPT OF CAPITAL  225

the exercise of cultural curiosity; in the objectified state when it con-

sists of the cultural goods possessed; in the institutionalised state
when it consists of educational qualifications and cultural credentials;
• social capital: consisting of an agent’s network of current or potential
relationships, the related web of material and symbolic exchanges, as
well as the patterns of relationships and socialisation acquired
through the membership of one or more social groups.

Capital in all of these forms and states is in a close relationship with

field, as Bourdieu clearly explains when he says that the “guises” (Bourdieu
1986: 243) capital takes strictly depend “on the field in which it func-
tions” as well as on “the cost of the more or less expensive transformations
which are the precondition for its efficacy in the field in question.”
Symbolic capital as meta-form of capital deserves to be discussed sepa-
rately; indeed, this notion designates the effects that any form of capital
exerts on a given social agent when it is not perceived according to its own
form. This capital is, on closer inspection, a cognitive effect “which rests
on cognition and recognition” (Bourdieu 1998: 85), or rather on “recog-
nition without knowledge” (Bourdieu 1984: 369), and coincides with a
form of misrecognition of the ultimately arbitrary character of the relation
of domination conveyed in the field by means of the specific capitals.
Clearly all forms of capital—especially when they are considered in their
incorporated state, that is, when they cohabit in the same substratum, the
living and cognitive body of its bearer—tend to blur into one another to
the point that it becomes difficult both to tell them apart and to isolate
them from the habitus. I want to suggest that the framework depicted in
The Forms of Capital can be better understood if placed within the funda-
mental Bourdieusian distinction between first- and second-order objectiv-
ity. Habitus, field and forms of capital are operators whose task is to shape
the relationship that arises between an “objective objectivity” given by
“the distribution of material resources and means of appropriation of
socially scarce goods and values,” and a “subjective objectivity” that exists
instead “in the form of systems of classification, the mental and bodily
schemata that function as symbolic templates for the practical activities—
conduct, thoughts, feelings and judgements—of social agents” (Bourdieu
and Wacquant 1992: 7). The paired integration of these two heteroge-
neous and yet isomorphic objectivities is realised within the ‘median’ order
of bodies and social practices and becomes investigable precisely through
the concepts of habitus, field and forms of capital, whose hybrid
226  M. AIELLO

conceptual structure—at once subjective and objective—has been designed

exactly to be sensitive to the subjective and objective sides of social reality.
If this interpretive framework is valid, some consequences can be drawn:
a) through the claim that cultural and social forms of capital are convert-
ible under certain conditions into economic capital, Bourdieu—far from
stating an economistic theorem—is simply suggesting that they are ready
to be converted into the most rigid core of first-order objectivity and thus
to be able, among other things, to define their bearer with respect to the
position it occupies in historically given relations of production; b) since
forms of capital are also always convertible into symbolic capital, they are
therefore capable of functioning even on the ground of second-order
objectivity, as symbolic and immaterial marks which nevertheless exert
material effects, invisible to a purely economistic consideration of social
reality. And considering a) and b), it follows c) that economic capital and
symbolic capital constitute the two polarities within which proper forms of
capital are susceptible to being translated.
In conclusion, the notion of capital in general serves to denote all those
objective aspects, effective and binding for the bearer and for other agents
as well, in which the relationship between first-order objectivity and
second-­order objectivity is articulated at various levels of reality. From this
admittedly generic definition, we will see how once capital is found embed-
ded in the field a polarisation between dominant and dominated bearers
emerges: in this situation, the quantity and quality of capital of the latter
is radically subordinated to that of the former and thereby rendered neg-
ligible. Just as the theory of practice has the dual nature of a theory of
action and a theory of knowledge, the theory of forms of capital is a fun-
damental, yet not exclusive, component of a broader theory of power and
domination.

Capital or the “animated monster which begins

to work, ‘as if its body were by love possessed’”

An evaluation of the greater or lesser degree of coherence of the

Bourdieusian notion of capital with the Marxian one cannot be made
without also making a comparison, albeit a schematic one, with the
‘mature’ work of the German thinker.
 10  REASSESSING BOURDIEU’S USE OF THE MARXIAN CONCEPT OF CAPITAL  227

“What I have to examine in this work is the capitalist mode of produc-

tion and the relations of production and forms of intercourse that corre-
spond to it” (Marx 1976: 90): with these words Marx defines the scientific
object of Das Kapital in the preface to the first German edition.
As many interpreters have emphasised—albeit with a diversity of accents
and interpretative nuances—in the first book of Das Kapital Marx con-
ducts a “phenomenological” investigation5 which, from the analysis of the
“elementary form” (Marx 1976: 125) acquired by wealth in societies
where the capitalist mode of production prevails, that is, the commodity
form, and of its “dual character” (Marx 1976: 131) (use value/exchange
value), proceeds to explicate a theory of value as the average working time
socially necessary for the production of the commodity and to emphasise
the monetary form assumed by value. Hence, Marx proceeds to outline a
sphere of “simple circulation” (Marx 1976: 248), the theatre of mercan-
tile acts of exchange of equivalents, of goods with money and of money
with goods: acts of buying (M-C) and selling (C-M) between holders of
commodities that are exchanged, without fraud or cunning, at their value.
As is well known, Marx argues that a capitalist economy, aimed at the
accumulation of abstract monetary quantities, cannot have as its ultimate
goal the accumulation of ‘concrete’ commodities, and cannot, therefore,
be properly understood on the basis of the cycle C-M-C, which begins and
ends with the commodity (first with its sale, and then with the purchase of
an equivalent commodity, aimed at fruition and consumption, and there-
fore at the ‘exit’ from circulation). Capitalist circulation must instead be
seen as a process that begins and ends with money (M-C-M). Apparently,
however, if we hold firm the dynamic of a pure exchange of equivalents,
we obtain the paradoxical picture of a capitalist economy in which no one
can become rich. The ‘correct’ cycle must therefore start with a given
amount of money, and end with a greater amount of money (M-C-M’).
This ‘increase’ is possible only if, among the commodities purchased,
there is one endowed with the particular virtue of producing a value
5
 In the sense of the Hegelian exposition of categories: cf. Finelli (1987, 2015), Bellofiore
(2013); Fineschi (2006); Micaloni (2017b); see also the now classical Rosdolsky (1977) and,
for what concerns the Grundrisse, Uchida (1988) and Meaney (2002). For a different recon-
struction of the critique of political economy, which modifies some crucial points of the
Marxian exposition, see Arthur (2002).
228  M. AIELLO

greater than the value that was necessary to produce it (and to purchase
it): such is the case of labour-power. That is to say, the capitalist must
meet, as a buyer, a seller who is so poor that he has nothing to sell as a
commodity other than his own bare labour-power, the capacity to work
“which exists only in his living body” (Marx 1976: 272). This labour-­
power is susceptible to being sold as a commodity only in compliance with
two conditions: that the seller is the “free proprietor” of it (Marx 1976:
271), and that he “must always sell it for a limited period only” (Marx
1976: 271). Only under the first condition, in fact, can the seller really be
the owner of goods, as well as relate as equal to the buyer and share with
him the status of a legal person. For the second, it is necessary that the
seller does not sell the commodity labour-power “in a lump, once and for
all” (Marx 1976: 271), a circumstance that would equate him with a slave.
As in the case of other commodities, the value of labour-power is equal
to the average socially necessary labour time required to produce it, which
in this case is equivalent to a quantum of means of subsistence necessary
to keep its living bearer alive and in sufficient strength to work.6 Through
the anticipation of a salary, corresponding to the value of these means of
subsistence, the owner of money (the “capitalist in larval form,” Marx
1976: 269) acquires the right to use and consume the purchased com-
modity. By dispensing labour for the capitalist during the working day, the
purchased labour-power not only works for the time necessary to repro-
duce its value (corresponding to the time necessary to produce the means
of subsistence: the “necessary labour”), but also provides a share of addi-
tional work (“surplus labour”) which the capitalist appropriates without
paying an equivalent value in return. Insofar as wages are equal to the
labour necessary to produce the means of subsistence and not to the
labour actually provided during the working day, there is a share of unpaid
labour time (exploitation), a surplus labour that is the basis of the surplus
value that allows the invested capital to expand its value, In this crucial
distinction between labour and labour-power lies the “secret” (Marx
1976: 280) of capitalist production, the condition of possibility of the
M-C-M cycle. In this scheme, Marx argues, monetary value becomes the
“subject” of a process in which it alternately assumes the form of

6
 It should be said that the issue of the value of labour-power, at least in connection with
the ‘transformation problem’, is much debated in the Marxist literature: see, for example,
Foley (1982), Starosta and Caligaris (2016).
 10  REASSESSING BOURDIEU’S USE OF THE MARXIAN CONCEPT OF CAPITAL  229

commodity and money. The transformation of money into capital takes

place ‘inside and outside’ the sphere of circulation7: inside, because it pre-
supposes and never breaks the juridical and economic rules of the exchange
of equivalents; outside, because it equally demands the use of labour-
power in a process of production that does not belong to the circulation
of commodities, but rather represents its suspension.
The scene of the exchange of equivalents between legally free and equal
persons constitutes at once the surface, the form of manifestation and the
necessary (but not sufficient) condition of capitalist production. If we stop
at the surface, however, the necessary manifestation is nothing other than
illusory appearance, a sleight of hand whereby a quantity of money seems
to possess the mystical capacity to generate more money, and conceals its
origin.8 In the egalitarian scene of the exchange of equivalents, both the
radical inequality between classes or economic functions—determined by
the different relationship (ownership or deprivation) that the members of
the classes have with the means of production—and the social relationship
of domination and exploitation that exists between the owners of capital
and those who, possessing nothing but their own capacity to work, are
forced to sell it as a commodity, are erased.
When, at the end of the first book of Capital, the violence of “primitive
accumulation” is pinpointed as the historical condition of possibility of the
production of capital as the immanent logic of capitalistic economy, Marx
has only illustrated in which ways capital is produced synchronically in its
logic and diachronically as a historical function. He has not yet explained
what it does once it has been produced: this discussion will in fact be the
subject of the second and third books of Capital, devoted respectively to
the circulation of capital and to the overall process of production and cir-
culation of capital.

7
 “His [of the capitalist] emergence as a butterfly must, and yet must not, take place in the
sphere of circulation” (Marx 1976: 269); and: “this whole course of events, the transforma-
tion of money into capital, both takes place and does not take place in the sphere of circula-
tion. It takes place through the mediation of circulation because it is conditioned by the
purchase of the labour-power in the market; it does not take place in circulation because what
happens there is only an introduction to the valorization process, which is entirely confined
to the sphere of production” (Marx 1976: 302).
8
 With regard to a later stage of the exposition, see also Marx (1993b: 516): “in interest-­
bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish is elaborated into its pure form, self-­valorizing
value, money breeding money, and in this form it no longer bears any marks of its origin
[Entstehung].”
230  M. AIELLO

As we will see later, both the processual character of capital and its char-
acter of social relation, as well as the necessity of an exploitation aimed at
the extraction of surplus value, are at the basis of many objections to
Bourdieu’s use of the concept of capital as presumptively congruent with
the Marxian concept. According to these readings, Bourdieu’s capital is a
set of goods and resources rather than a process, it does not define a social
relationship insofar as all agents are connoted as possessors of capital; and
it remains, moreover, confined to a theory of value belonging to the
sphere of circulation, whereas Marx investigates the genesis and produc-
tion of capital as dependent on a nexus of exploitation between classes.
These objections will be discussed below in greater detail.

To What Extent Are Bourdieu and Marx’s Concepts

of Capital Compatible?

So far, I have argued that Bourdieu’s concept of capital is based on the

idea that the social properties active in the disparate domains of practice
function analogously to how the capital nexus functions in the economic
domain. In other words, all properties that have social efficacy by virtue of
their efficacy function as a capital nexus. However, we still need to explain
how, in general, we justify the use of a single notion to denote them (which
amounts to questioning the core commensurability of forms of capital)
and, more specifically, how we justify the use of the category of capital. In
order to answer both sides of this question, it is necessary to render explicit
the nature and the theoretical significance of Bourdieu’s appropriation of
Marx’s capital. This operation can be split into two distinct
sub-operations.
Bourdieu achieves a double relativisation, synchronic and diachronic,
of the economic domain. Economic practices are not only historically
determined; they are also mere subspecies of practices in the context of a
more general economy of practices. As we have seen above, the theory of
a general economy of practices assesses that a more general “economic”
character pervades all social practices—their immanent ratio, their inter-
est—and that the strictly economic practices, in that they are subspecies of
practices, are ruled by a particular and not generalisable logic.9 It is worth

9
 “The science called ‘economics’ is based on an initial act of abstraction that consists in
dissociating a particular category of practices, or a particular dimension of all practice, from
the social order in which all human practice is immersed” (Bourdieu 2005: 1).
 10  REASSESSING BOURDIEU’S USE OF THE MARXIAN CONCEPT OF CAPITAL  231

noting that, despite the many accusations of economism addressed to

Marx and Marxism, Bourdieu’s operation is mostly in line with the de-­
naturalisation of the categories of bourgeois classical economics promoted
by Marx’s critique of political economy.
Against the classical economists’ attempts to derive universal economic
laws from the functioning of a capitalist economy, Marx argues that since
the capitalist mode of production is only the current and historically deter-
mined mode of production its modalities of functioning cannot be univer-
salised and passed off as eternal laws, already existing and valid from time
immemorial, as the bourgeois economists claim to do with their
“Robinsonades” (Marx 1973: 83). Indeed, in the 1857 Introduction of
his Grundrisse, Marx condemns the eternalisation of historically deter-
mined relations promoted, for example, when the single and isolated indi-
vidual is placed at the beginning of the production process. Both “the
individual and isolated hunter and fisherman with whom Smith and
Ricardo begin” and “Rousseau’s contrat social, which brings naturally
independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by con-
tract,” turn out to be backward projections of the individual of civil society
which, says Marx, was “in preparation since the sixteenth century and
making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth” (Marx 1973:
83). This individual is falsely presented “not as a historic result, but as his-
tory’s point of departure” (Marx 1973: 83). Against this illusion, Marx
argues that “the more deeply we go back into history, the more does the
individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent,
as belonging to a greater whole” (Marx 1973: 84). A similar distortion
affects the theorisation of “production in general,” that is, that enuncia-
tion of the “general preconditions of all production” (Marx 1973: 88) to
be found in the first economics textbooks: such production in general
ends up being “encased in eternal laws of nature independent of history”
on which to graft “bourgeois relations […] quietly smuggled in as the invi-
olable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded” (Marx
1973: 87). This happens, for example, when we go from the tautology
according to which “all production is appropriation of nature on the part
of an individual, within and through a certain form of society” (Marx
1973: 87) to the universalisation of a historically determined form of
appropriation, for example, private property.
This seems to be exactly the direction Bourdieu takes when he
states that:
232  M. AIELLO

the constitution of a science of mercantile relationships which, inasmuch as

it takes for granted the very foundations of the order it claims to analyze—
private property, profit, wage labour, etc.—is not even a science of the field
of property –, is not even a science of the field of economic production, has
prevented the constitution of a general science of the economy of practices,
which would treat mercantile exchange as a particular case of exchange in all
its forms. (Bourdieu 1986: 242)

2) Bourdieu’s theory of forms of capital and his thesis of a general

economy of practices allow capital, a category of economic nature, to spill
out of its legitimate domain (which has been relativised and made periph-
eral in the previous passage) and into other dimensions of social experi-
ence. Such a borrowing is justified by the fact that this category is able to
express with greater clarity aspects common to all social practices that the
multiplicity and particularism of not strictly economic practices evidently
conceal or do not express with sufficient clarity. These aspects can be
enclosed under the following headings:

• all socially effective properties are the outcome of a historically deter-

mined accumulation achieved through labour. This first trait, albeit
fundamental, is non-specific, as it can be found both in Marx and in
the tradition of classical political economy;
• all practices, economic and non-economic, are animated by some
interest that underlies their investment in a field of practice: this
point is a specific innovation of Bourdieu’s thought and has been
widely discussed in the literature devoted to Bourdieu’s economic
anthropology;10
• at a first glance, each agent simply owns a determined and variously
configured volume of capital; but considering a concrete social field,
the distribution of the possessors of capitals gives rise to a polariza-
tion between dominant possessors and dominated possessors, which
ultimately functions analogously to the distinction between possess-
ors and non-possessors of capital: this polarisation is fundamental to
the functioning of fields and underlies the entire symbolic economy
of distinction. This third point introduces a discontinuity: the capital
thematised by Bourdieu does not have an asocial nature, it is not a
pure means of appropriating surplus: instead it contains an intrinsic
reference to the specific relation of domination that runs through the
field of practice.

10
 For an updated review, see Girometti (2020).
 10  REASSESSING BOURDIEU’S USE OF THE MARXIAN CONCEPT OF CAPITAL  233

Thus, a methodological tenet for evaluating the relationship between

Bourdieu and Marx’s uses of the concept of capital follows: the congru-
ence between the two notions a) is necessarily partial, b) must be evalu-
ated and tested on the ground of shared aspects, and c) does not imply, in
principle, the incompatibility between the validity of one theory and the
validity of the other—on the contrary, we defend the thesis that each the-
ory contributes to shed light on the other in a specific way. On the basis of
this methodological framework, a more fine-grained account of the issue
can be provided.
First, against the idea that Bourdieu simply extends Marx’s capital, it
would be more correct to speak of a selective generalisation: extension is
in fact a monolithic operation, which takes place—problematically—on a
1:1 scale, while in Bourdieu’s capital only some aspects of Marx’s capital
seem to act.
Secondly, the partial congruence between Marxian and Bourdieusian
capital is effective and consistent if and only if some transformation coor-
dinates are specified. Which are the following:
The holistic tenet. The use of the notion of capital makes sense only if
referring to habitus and field. The latter constitute an integrated system of
analytical tools, each containing a reference to the others and moreover
presupposing them: it is this approach that should eventually be criticised.
Capital in its forms and states helps to denote the more objective compo-
nent of the median and reciprocal space of expression between first- and
second-order objectivities constituted by the order of bodies and practices.
The multiplication of agents who enact the nexus of capital, and its limit.
Reading social practices and access to fields through capital renders visible
the following dynamic: each social agent—not only the two main “charac-
ters” in the Marxian sense (Marx 1976, 179)—accesses a field and invests
its capital. Capital comes back in a constant or increased form (reproduc-
ing the conditions of its own valorisation), after having or not having
undergone qualitative transformations according to the modes of convert-
ibility. Because of this implication, all social agents are problematically
constructed in analogy to the capitalist one. However, for the principles
that define the field (in which every position exercises and undergoes
forces), in every social agent both the logical role of the capitalist and its
opposite is inscribed. Thus multiplication finds its limit as soon as we con-
sider a field of practice in its totality: according to the first principle of
homology among fields of practice (Bourdieu 1984: 242–247; Bourdieu
and Wacquant 1992: 75), all fields share the property of having their own
234  M. AIELLO

dominants and their own dominated. Those who dominate the field are
those who value their capital the most and the best, who somehow hold
the monopoly of legitimate capital by driving the dominated capital hold-
ers into irrelevance and subalternity. The picture that emerges from the
intersection of the notion of capital with that of field shows that capital
coincides neither with the nonspecific, instrumental, and asocial concep-
tion of capital as a produced means of production, nor with the Marxian
conception of capital that underlies a specific type of social relation
between classes. It is a “third” and somewhat median position between
the two conceptions, because on the one hand it constitutively alludes to
a polarisation of social relations, and on the other hand these social rela-
tions are not exhausted or completely superimposed on the relation
between bourgeois class and proletariat.
The multiplication of the spheres of reality in which the capital nexus is
exercised. This is the plurality of social fields.
The multiplication of the socially effective properties conveying the capital
nexus. This is the configuration of the forms and states of capital.
These are the coordinates within which the cluster of properties shared
by the two notions of capital must be placed. On the one hand, the
Bourdieusian notion stretches out across the “non-specific” semantic
ground given by its being accumulated labour, on the other hand it con-
tains an essential reference, although not always explicit, to a distinction
between possessors and non-possessors.

Objections
It is possible now to review the main arguments according to which
Bourdieu’s use of the notion of capital is not adequately or is only appar-
ently Marxian. Before presenting these criticisms, two circumstances that
hinder any discussion on this subject should be made explicit. First,
Bourdieu’s texts—his mentions of economic capital—do not allow us to
clearly infer if and to what extent he subscribes to or presupposes, even in
principle, the Marxian conception of capital and the related vision of capi-
talism. Secondly, Bourdieu does not offer a pure economic sociology, nor
does he specifically address the concept of labour. These circumstances
impose an enormous hermeneutic constraint on the evaluation of the rela-
tionship between Bourdieu’s theorisation of capital and the Marxian one.
 10  REASSESSING BOURDIEU’S USE OF THE MARXIAN CONCEPT OF CAPITAL  235

1. Objection to substantialism. This type of criticism (Krais and

Gebauer 2002; Bidet 2008; Desan 2013: 335) suggests that
Bourdieusian capital—far from denoting a social relationship as in
Marx—only designates things, resources and endowments. The
substantialist attitude underlying capital –revealed for example by
the inflationary multiplication of subspecies of capital—seems objec-
tively incongruent with the Bourdieusian relational method.
2. Objection to circulation. Beasley-Murray (2000) and Desan (2013)
have shown how the passages in which Bourdieu most explicitly
expounds the substance of value common to all forms of capital,
while manifestly echoing the labour theory of value expounded at
the beginning of Capital, conceal nonetheless a profound misun-
derstanding of Marx. In fact, Bourdieu says that “capital is accumu-
lated labour (in its materialized form or its “incorporated”, embodied
form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e. exclusive, basis by
agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social
energy in the form of reified or living labour” (Bourdieu 1986: 241).

Or again,

The universal equivalent, the measure of all equivalences, is nothing other

than labour time (in the widest sense); the conservation of social energy
through all its conversions is verified if, in each case, one takes into account
both the labour-time accumulated in the form of capital and the labour-time
needed to transform it from one type into another. (Bourdieu 1986: 253)

Beasley-Murray (2000: 105) notes how such a “proximity to ortho-

doxy is misleading,” insofar as defining capital as accumulated labour-­
value does not yet mean defining it in the Marxian sense of “value in
process.” In the same vein, Desan (2013: 330) suggests that since Marx’s
exposition of the labour theory of value serves the sole purpose of making
possible the exchangeability of commodities and does not yet define a full-­
fledged theory of capital, to the extent that Bourdieu refers to the labour
theory of value to define capital, he condemns himself to conceive his own
notion of capital only in terms of commodity and to place his theory of
capital on the mere terrain of circulation. Therefore, Bourdieu’s concept
of capital has a commodity-like nature and is nothing but a commodity.
236  M. AIELLO

3. Objection to the missing exploitation (Beasley-Murray 2000: 101;

Desan 2013: 332, 335). This objection certainly seems decisive.
Indeed, it seems it is not possible to identify a logic resembling the
exploitation of labour-power in the capital investment within fields
of practice. Here, capitals are accumulated by agents without the
extraction of surplus value from surplus labour. Moreover, to make
matters worse, precisely because exploitation of labour-power is
missing, it follows that also all contradictions between realisation
and valorisation of capital are missing.
4. Objection to trans-historicity (Calhoun 1993: 66–68). Whereas for
Marx capital is a social relation of production specific to the capital-
ist mode of production, for Bourdieu capital takes on a trans-­
historical descriptive and explanatory quality.

Counter-objections
All these objections emphasise evident discontinuities between the two
theorisations of capital: however, we should examine whether more accu-
rate research into the corpus of the two authors is able to provide a more
fine-grained account of the issues raised by critics.
Re 1). As a thinker of social totality, Bourdieu warns against consider-
ing capital in a substantive and isolated way. Only taking the link between
capital and field seriously can we understand Bourdieu when he says that
“capital is a social relation, that is, a social energy that exists and produces
its effects only in the field in which it is generated and regenerated.” The
field plays a determining role, since:

each of the properties attached to class is given its value and efficacy by the
specific laws of each field. In practice, that is, in a particular field, the proper-
ties, internalized in dispositions or objectified in economic or cultural goods,
which are attached to agents are not all simultaneously operative; the spe-
cific logic of the field determines those which are valid in this market, which
are pertinent and active in the game in question, and which, in the relation-
ship with this field, function as specific capital and, consequently, as a factor
explaining practices. (Bourdieu 1984: 113)

Moreover, far from being mere things and resources, for Bourdieu cap-
itals subtend the social conditions of their production and appropriation as
well as the social relations underlying their production and appropriation
 10  REASSESSING BOURDIEU’S USE OF THE MARXIAN CONCEPT OF CAPITAL  237

that are transferred to the habitus of the bearer: indeed, the “conditions
of acquisition [of the properties that social actors possess at a given time]
persist in the habitus (the hysteresis effect)” (Bourdieu 1984: 109).
However, the very reflection on the hysteresis of habitus highlights how
“although they are always perpetuated in the dispositions constituting the
habitus, the conditions of acquisition of the properties synchronically
observed only make themselves visible in cases of discordance between the
conditions of acquisition and the conditions of use” (Bourdieu 1984:
109). Tackling the substantialist objection from this perspective leads us
to acknowledge that, by virtue of the holistic tenet, the study of the social
relations underlying the acquisition and accumulation of capital must be
supplemented with the study of the habitus of the possessors, as well as the
determination of the specific forces that traverse the field.
In any case, in Marx’s Capital too, fully developed and circulating capi-
tal, though being a social relationship, never ceases to be embodied in
concrete capitals (a business’s stocks, shares and constant capital in the
form of means of production, etc.) and individual capitalists who fulfil its
logic: they constitute, respectively, objectifications and personifications of
the only true subject, depositary of the utmost causal efficacy, of the eco-
nomic process. If this were not so, that is, if the circuit of capital did not
dispose of a material and plural base to graft onto, Marx would have
described a purely spiritual and disembodied dynamic.
Compared to classical political economy, Marx’s contribution consisted
in highlighting how capital as a generic means of production grafts onto a
specific social relationship of production typical of the Modern Age,
namely the exploitation of wage-labour by the capitalist class, and that the
extraction of living labour from the labour-power subsumed under capital
is the only source of the surplus value. However, capital does not cease to
be, amongst other things, means of production. It becomes capable of
producing in a specific way—more money from money—within a specific
social relation of production which presupposes a historically determined
relation between classes: so that, from being a bare means, it also becomes
the end of the economic process, and finally the automatic subject of the
mode of production itself.
Re 2). This objection claims that Bourdieusian capital has a purely cir-
culatory and “commodity-like” character. However, the objection may be
objected to in turn, since it betrays some potential misunderstandings of
the Marxian text. The labour theory of value is not merely a premise of
commodity exchange, but rather a necessary though not sufficient
238  M. AIELLO

condition of the whole process of production and circulation of capital.

And even the theory of exploitation of labour-power presupposes the
labour theory of value.
Moreover, for Marx circulation is not only (simple) circulation of com-
modities. There is a specific process of circulation of capital, to which the
entire second book is devoted—which by no coincidence is subtitled ‘The
Process of Circulation of Capital’. Here Marx (1993a: 109) assesses that
“the circuit of capital comprises three stages.” In the first, “the capitalist
appears on the commodity and labour market as a buyer” (M-C). In the
second stage, there is the “productive consumption” of the commodities
purchased (means and labour-power), from which “commodities of
greater value than those of its elements of production” result. In the third,
“the capitalist returns to the market as a seller,” again converting his com-
modity into money (C-M). When capital is produced it does not circulate,
when it circulates it cannot—clearly—be produced: capital needs both
movements to achieve its own valorisation and realisation. In order to
optimise the process, it becomes all the more urgent to reduce the time of
both production (increased productivity, automation, etc.) and circulation
(optimisation of distribution and consumption).
Circulating capital changes form and is implemented in different seg-
ments of reality and of the economic process: these three stages corre-
spond to three distinct forms of capital, the “different forms with which
capital clothes itself in its different stages, alternately assuming them and
casting them aside” (Marx 1993a: 109). Depending on whether we start
from the first, the second or the third stage, we have the specific cycle of
monetary capital, productive capital and trade-capital, analysed in the first
section of book II, appropriately entitled ‘The Metamorphoses of Capital
and their Circuit’.
Moreover, in book II the image of an internally composite (industrial)
capital emerges, divided into quota-parts (advance money, reserve money
fund, labour and means of production, stock of goods, etc.), which are
then divided into different parts. Nor, for that matter, is industrial capital
the only existing form or type of capital, since commercial capital and,
later, credit are still to be considered.
Finally, limiting our consideration of industrial capital and its three
cycles, Marx crucially introduces the time-factor into his investigation, and
provides a complex articulation of synchrony and diachrony between
forms. Each individual industrial capital, Marx argues, is simultaneously
found in all three forms:
 10  REASSESSING BOURDIEU’S USE OF THE MARXIAN CONCEPT OF CAPITAL  239

The three circuits, the forms of reproduction of the three varieties of capital,
are continuously executed alongside one another. One part of the capital
value, for example, which for the moment functions as commodity capital,
is transformed into money capital, while at the same time another part passes
out of the production process into circulation as new commodity capital.
Thus the circular form of C′…C′ is constantly described, and the same is the
case with the two other forms. The reproduction of the capital in each of its
forms and at each of its stages is just as continuous as is the metamorphosis
of these forms and their successive passage through the three stages. Here,
therefore, the entire circuit is the real unity of its three forms. (Marx
1993a: 181)

Synchrony and diachrony, then. While on the one hand “the real circuit
of industrial capital in its continuity” can only be “unity of all three of its
circuits,” on the other hand “it can only be such unity insofar as each dif-
ferent part of the capital runs in succession through the successive phases
of the circuit, can pass over from one phase and one functional form into
the other” (Marx 1993b: 183), and thus capital “exists simultaneously in
its various phases and functions, and thus describes all three circuits at
once.” It is a succession and contemporaneity of the forms (and parts) of
capital which imply and condition each other: if “the succession
[Nacheinander] of the various parts is (…) determined by their coexis-
tence [Nebeneinander],” it is equally true that the contemporaneity of the
phases and parts “exists only through the movement in which the portions
of capital successively describe the various stages. The coexistence is itself
only the result of the succession” (Marx 1993a: 183).
Marx insists firmly both on the mutual conditioning between the parts
of capital, and on the temporal determinations of synchrony and diachrony
that qualify the relationship between the parts caught in their own cycle:

the circular course of one functional form determines that of the others.
[…] Different fractions of the capital successively pass through the different
stages and functional forms. […] As a whole, then, the capital is simultane-
ously present, and spatially coexistent, in its various phases. But each part is
constantly passing from one phase or functional form into another, and thus
functions in all of them in turn. The forms are therefore fluid forms, and
their simultaneity is mediated by their succession. Each form both follows
and precedes the others, so that the return of one part of the capital to one
form is determined by the return of another part to another form. (Marx
1993a: 184)
240  M. AIELLO

This brief overview of the fundamental features of the Marxian concept

is aimed at emphasising those aspects that undermine an overly schematic
conception of capital.
Firstly, ‘circulation’ must not be intended as the simple circulation of
commodities: the first book illustrates the phenomenological develop-
ment of an economic formation that has already been empirically consti-
tuted, that already pervades the functioning of the economy; the second
and third books have the task of describing this functioning as a whole and
its reproduction. Secondly, the idea that various forms of already consti-
tuted (economic) capital coexist, underlying different sectors of reality,
converting one into the other and defining each other synchronically and
diachronically, is an idea certainly present in Marx’s thought and in many
ways—without it being philologically possible to verify Bourdieu’s thor-
ough knowledge of the entire Capital—it is expanded and reintroduced
by the French sociologist.
Therefore, at least in these respects, we may say that the way Bourdieu
configures capital is grounded in Marx’s work.
Re 3). This third objection is virtually fatal, because it illuminates the
most significant discrepancy in the context of the partial congruence I
have tried to describe between Bourdieu and Marx’s concepts of capital.
However, perhaps going a little beyond what Bourdieu states explicitly, it
is possible to undermine its main argument, demonstrating that also in the
economy of practices something like a secret of production (and of repro-
duction) is active, and namely that i) there is a subsumption11 of the non-­
possessor of capital under capital; ii) that in this subsumption a counterpart
of surplus value is extracted, which can be said to be at the basis of an
analogous increase in the initial capital.
I would like to suggest here that i) such subsumption is constituted by
symbolic violence, ii) and the homologue of surplus value in the economy
of practices is a symbolic surplus recognition (a “recognition without knowl-
edge”) extracted from the cognitive labour of the dominated by the domi-
nants; and that such valorisation can best be understood in the sense of an
intensification of a symbolic credit. In other words, the form of capital
11
 In this context the term ‘exploitation’ should be intended as ‘exploitation of labour-­
power’ or more exactly as ‘subsumption of labour-power’. Indeed, as Beasley-Murray (2000:
116) also notes, the phenomenon of the exploitation of labour per se does not quintessen-
tially define the capitalist mode of production. There are non-capitalist forms of labour
exploitation both in non-capitalist societies (serfdom, slavery, khammessa) and in capitalist
societies (unpaid domestic labour).
 10  REASSESSING BOURDIEU’S USE OF THE MARXIAN CONCEPT OF CAPITAL  241

most similar to Marxian capital, which subsumes labour-power, is symbolic

capital—that is, the particular state, objective and cognitive at once, that
all forms of capital can acquire—when accompanied by some degree of sym-
bolic violence.
It has been noted that the theory of the forms of capital is a contribu-
tion to the general theory of power and domination, whose fulcrum is the
concept of symbolic violence. According to Bourdieu domination is not a
relationship of pure activity on the part of the dominant and of pure pas-
sivity on the part of the dominated. The strongest domination—that is,
the domination whose possibility of being questioned has been reduced to
a minimum—is the effect of a symbolic violence, that is, a violence that,
far from arising from the exercise of physical force, is realised only through
the “complicity” of the dominated, that is, through all the cognitive activi-
ties of the dominated that implicitly legitimate the order in which they are
dominated, which is produced when they perceive this order as natural
and not problematic. This immaterial effect, which exists only in minds
and brains in the form of cognitive patterns of perception, evaluation and
classification, turns out to have a very material implication: it guarantees
the prolongation of the temporal existence of that given order of symbolic
and power relations. Thus symbolic violence is a soft, invisible, and intan-
gible imposition of legitimacy that takes place when those who undergo
such imposition do not have any other categories of perception and evalu-
ation other than those conveyed by the relation of domination itself, which
“being merely the incorporated form of the structure of the relation of
domination, make this relation appear as natural” (Bourdieu 2000: 170).
This cognitive commonality conceals a more subtle form of cognitive
alienation: the dominated do not have other means of representation—
and hence of production—of reality other than those that are instilled in
concrete social experience and therefore already pervaded by a relation-
ship of domination. In other words, under symbolic violence they have no
means of production other than their “naked” cognitive capacity to
“work” and elaborate experience: in fact, the categories with which the
dominated shape experience do not belong to them, except insofar as they
have incorporated them without determining them in the first place. This
“extraneous interiority” of the social categories with which the dominated
think of themselves and others is at the basis of the deep-rooted illusion of
naturalness that pervades all the representations they produce: among
these representations—crystallisations of cognitive work—the most valu-
able is the legitimacy, or rather the symbolic legitimation, of the order that
242  M. AIELLO

dominates them, which corresponds to a symbolic surplus recognition in

favour of this same order. In Bourdieu’s terms it is a paradoxical recogni-
tion that takes place without knowledge, that is, it is a misrecognition of
the arbitrary character of what is recognised. The extraneous inwardness of
cognitive categories, as well as the inadequate knowledge of the social
conditions of possibility of cognitive acts,12 is therefore at the basis of the
“paradoxical subjection” (Paolucci 2010) conveyed in symbolic violence.
I mean to suggest that symbolic violence functions as a homologue of
surplus-value extraction; in fact, in the regime of symbolic violence, the
dominated perform cognitive labour that makes use of categories—which
literally play the role of means of production—that do not belong to them
(except insofar as they have incorporated them) and that have an arbitrary
basis of production and application. Through this cognitive labour they
produce more legitimacy and legitimation than the dominants had previ-
ously produced upon encountering the dominated, and the substance of
value of this symbolic surplus recognition corresponds to an extension of
the temporal existence of the recognised order.
If we consider the case of intellectuals, defined as a dominated fraction
of the dominant class, the condition in which intellectuals pursue the valo-
risation of their cultural capital can be compared to the condition of con-
tradiction between realisation and valorisation of capital that Marx (1993b:
355 ff.) describes in book III of Capital. In fact, in the capitalist mode of
production, the bearer of labour-power has two modes of existence: the
wage-labourer who, in the sphere of production, has a productive role—
the more productive of value the more exploited the wage-labourer is—
and the consumer, whose acts of purchasing commodities are a condition
of realisation of the surplus value produced. This double role means that
the more surplus value he produces, that is, the more the share of neces-
sary work is reduced, the less the wage he receives can buy commodities
and realise the surplus value contained therein. It follows that in the long
run capital is self-contradictory, because its valorisation—forced both to
contract the share of necessary labour and to expel from the production
processes the same agents who are then called upon to be buyers of com-
modities in the circulation—hinders its realisation.
The cultural and symbolic capital of intellectuals is inversely subjected
to the same contradiction between valorisation and realisation:
12
 According to Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), symbolic violence unleashes a power that
enhances, as a further force, the power relationship in which it is generated precisely insofar
as it masks it.
 10  REASSESSING BOURDIEU’S USE OF THE MARXIAN CONCEPT OF CAPITAL  243

Intellectuals and artists are thus divided between their interest in cultural
proselytism, that is, winning a market by widening their audience, which
inclines them to favour popularization, and concern for cultural distinction,
the only objective basis of their rarity; and their relationship to everything
concerned with the ‘democratization of culture’ is marked by a deep ambiv-
alence which may be manifested in a dual, or rather doubled discourse [dans
un discours double ou, mieux, dédoublé] on the relations between the institu-
tions of cultural diffusion and the public. (Bourdieu 1984: 229, transl. mod.)

Setting aside the lexicon of scarcity which has the fault of disguising the
historical and accumulated character of cultural mastery, as well as the
related social conditions of possibility, what is really at stake in this passage
is the valorisation of a “profit in distinction,” achievable only by extracting
“recognition without knowledge” from an audience. However, an authen-
tic captivation of that same public also entails the serious possibility of neu-
tralising its own distinction: the discourse addressed to the public, Bourdieu
notes, is “doubled [dedoublé],” just as is the public itself, which is asked to
be both consumer and producer of legitimacy. And insofar as making one-
self known also presupposes providing tools to be understood and decoded,
self-disclosure entails a double effect: that is, it reduces the share of the
surplus labour of recognition without knowledge, in favour of the share of
genuine knowledge labour. This internal rearrangement of the shares of
cognitive labour implies a contraction of the margins of symbolic surplus
recognition. Therefore, similarly to the contradiction to be found in the
overall process of capital production and circulation, whereby the valorisa-
tion of capital hinders its realisation, inversely, in the search for the audience
necessary for the valorisation of one’s capital, popularisation symbolically
hinders distinction. In the case of intellectuals and artists, the “profit in dis-
tinction” and the “profit in legitimacy,” which is “the profit par excellence,
which consists in the fact of feeling justified in being (what one is), being
what it is right to be” (Bourdieu 1984: 228)13 contradict each other.

13
 It is worth noting that behind the search for a profit in legitimacy a specific psychody-
namic instance is at play. According to Bourdieu there is “a necessary link between three
indisputable and inseparable anthropological facts: man is and knows he is mortal, the
thought that he is going to die is unbearable or impossible for him, and, condemned to
death, an end […] he is a being without a reason for being, haunted by the need for justifica-
tion, legitimation, recognition. And, as Pascal suggests, in this quest for justifications for
existing, what he calls ‘the world’, or ‘society’, is the only recourse other than God”
(Bourdieu 2000: 239). It is this kind of search that ultimately underlies investment, illusio
and forms of distinction.
244  M. AIELLO

This kind of reading, centred on the economy of symbolic profit, sug-

gest that symbolic capital plays the role of true capital, which moves other
forms of capital to the advantage of its own valorisation and intensifica-
tion. This notion—“which rests on cognition”—has been pinpointed as
“denied [denié] capital, recognized as legitimate, that is, misrecognized as
capital” and “is perhaps the only possible form of accumulation, when
economic capital is not recognized” (Bourdieu 1990: 118). Between sym-
bolic capital and symbolic violence there is a relationship of complemen-
tarity: while the former is the outcome of a cognitive labour of recognition
and misrecognition, the latter is the bilateral act denoting the extraction
and production of such labour.
Re 4). Finally, let us consider the inconvenient trans-historical nature of
the Bourdieusian forms of capital, where what is meant is that for Marx
capital is the social ‘form’ of a historically determined mode of production.
The Introduction of 185714 opens with a discussion of production.
When we speak of production, Marx notes, we always speak of a concrete
production, defined by a specific degree of development of the social pro-
ductive forces. However, it is also true that “all epochs of production have
certain common traits” (Marx 1973: 85). It is for this reason that “pro-
duction in general,” the expression with which economists usually begin
their treatises, turns out to be a useful, sensible, “rational [verständige]
abstraction,” “insofar as it really brings out and fixes the common ele-
ment, and saves us repetition” (Marx 1973: 85). So on the one hand,
production in general is an abstraction that does not explain any concrete
mode of production, on the other hand, however, it defines the most gen-
eral traits that are common to all production and without which no con-
crete production is given, for example, tools and hands as instruments. It
is essential to identify the traits common to the productions of all eras so
as to isolate more precisely the traits that instead constitute the specific
difference of the modes of production. Marx writes:

No production will be thinkable without them [the determinations com-

mon to all epochs]; however, even though the most developed languages
have laws and characteristics in common with the least developed, neverthe-
less just those things which determine their development, i.e. the elements
which are not general and common, must be separated out from the deter-
minations valid for production as such, so that in their unity—which arises
already from the identity of the subject, humanity, and of the object,

 For an updated account of this text, see Micaloni (2017a).

14
 10  REASSESSING BOURDIEU’S USE OF THE MARXIAN CONCEPT OF CAPITAL  245

nature—their essential difference is not forgotten. The whole profundity of

those modern economists who demonstrate the eternity and harmonious-
ness of the existing social relations lies in this forgetting. For example. No
production possible without an instrument of production, even if this
instrument is only the hand; no production without stored-up, past labour,
even if it is only the facility gathered together and concentrated in the hand
of the savage by repeated practice. Capital is, among other things, also an
instrument of production, also objectified, past labour. Therefore capital is
a general, eternal relation of nature. That is, if I leave out just the specific
quality which alone makes “instrument of production” and “stored-up
labour” into a capital. (Marx 1973: 85–86)

I suggest that this Marxian passage allows to view Bourdieu’s concept

of capital in terms analogous to those underlying the logic of production
in general. The capital theorised and pluralised by Bourdieu in many
spheres of practice contains only those traits without which no social prac-
tice endowed with objective and binding value can be obtained: the cumu-
lative nature of experience, whether incorporated or objectified, the fact
that at the basis of the necessary investment there is a form of interest, the
distinction between dominant possessors and dominated possessors which
functions as a distinction between possessors and non-possessors.
Moreover, one could try to argue that in the general economy of social
practices of all times a latent logic of productive and reproductive func-
tioning can be found and that only at a certain point in history—that is,
only when the economic has disembedded itself from the tangle of personal-­
feudal and communitarian ties—has it “become true in practice” (Marx
1973: 105), embodying itself in a specific sphere of reality, the economic
one, and in a specific relationship between historically determined social
classes. When socio-economic conditions became the most favourable to
the enhancement of the polarising logic that characterises the domination
of a field by means of capital, that is, when the most complete separation
of a class of free individuals from the means of production occurred, this
logic began to totally inform the economic sphere and acquire the traits
that provide the capitalist mode of production with its specific difference:
the exploitation of wage-labour in the fractions of the working day. Hence,
when the capitalist mode of production becomes dominant,15 it also ends

15
 That is, to the extent to which the reproduction of the conditions of existence of the
dominated is increasingly bound to earning a wage and production essentially becomes the
production of more money by means of money.
246  M. AIELLO

up subsuming, of course in a mediated way, the other spheres of practice,

which, however, keep functioning according to the principles of a general
economy of practices.
So, the issues raised by the objection to the trans-historicity of
Bourdieu’s theory of capital provide the opportunity to outline an “inter-
laced” account of the relationship between Marx and Bourdieu’s concepts
of capital: on the one hand, the concept of production in general in Marx
provides a key to access some of the most valuable core elements of
Bourdieu’s notion of capital; on the other hand, Bourdieu provides Marx
with those general requirements of domination that the capitalist econ-
omy and its social order fulfil in the purest form.

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———. 2014. Capital conversion in post- modern economies. In Re-Thinking
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———. 1993b [1894]. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, vol. III. Trans.
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 CHAPTER 11

Bourdieu, Marx, and the Economy

Frédéric Lebaron

Pierre Bourdieu was long perceived as a “Weberian” sociologist because of

his early texts and his close relationship with Raymond Aron. His refer-
ence to Marx nonetheless remained constant throughout his work: in the
first edition in French of The Algerians, entitled Sociologie de l’Algérie
(Bourdieu 1962), references to Marx are implicit, as revealed in the use of
concepts such as “sous-prolétariat” (“sub-proletariat”), “prolétariat”
(“proletariat”) (p. 121), “salariat” (“salariat”) (p. 121) and “conscience
de classe” (“class consciousness”) (p. 123). In one of his last works, enti-
tled in French Les structures sociales de l’Économie (in English The Social
Structures of the Economy) (Bourdieu 2005 [2000]), he refers even more
explicitly—a citation that has become an almost ritual reference for criti-
cizing scholastic bias—to a famous phrase used by Marx when referring to
Hegel (arguing that Hegel confused “the things of logic with the logic of
things,” p.19) and, in a more normative postscript, to the processes of
capitalist “concentration” and “monopolization” (p. 273).
The decision to focus part of his early Algerian studies on “work and
workers” (Quijoux 2015) reveals what may be referred to as a strand of

F. Lebaron (*)
IDHES, ENS Paris-Saclay, Université Paris-Saclay, Paris, France
e-mail: frederic.lebaron@ens-paris-saclay.fr

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 249

Switzerland AG 2022
G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and
Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_11
250  F. LEBARON

Marxism in Bourdieu’s work. Indeed, he emphasizes the division of soci-

ety into objectively differentiated groups sharing hierarchical and conflic-
tual relationships. He refers to these groups as social classes and argues that
they cannot be dissociated from the spheres in which they are produced,
even if they amount to more than merely the sum of those spheres. From
an empirical point of view, he therefore views classes in a way that closely
resembles Marx’s socio-historical analyses but avoids being caught up in
the theoretical apparatus that the latter associated with them. As a result,
concepts such as “exploitation,” “surplus value,” or even “class struggle,”
which structure the Marxist theory of value by basing it on an analysis of
the productive process, are absent from Bourdieu’s1 theoretical model.
This chapter seeks to show that Bourdieu draws on an in-depth and
quite unique interpretation of Marx, and of certain Marxists, and that he
always distances himself from Marxist economic theorization. Similarly, he
distances himself from the theories developed by two other major eco-
nomic “models,” namely neoclassical economics (which he discusses, in
particular Becker and Boudon) and Keynesian economics (on which he
does a comparative analysis during the conference, and then in the book,
entitled in French Le partage des bénéfices (Sharing Benefits, untranslated)).
This strategy leads Bourdieu to some form of avoidance and to a highly
ambivalent relationship, which is accentuated by two historical contexts
(the “Marxist moment” of May 1968 and subsequent years, then the
decline of Marxism in the intellectual and political field at the turn of the
1970s), before its revival and more direct intellectual confrontation
after 1993.

A “remote” Use of Marxism

Bourdieu’s initial references to Marxist concepts, in particular the concept
of the “proletariat” (which gave rise to the development of the “sub-­
proletariat” concept, i.e. one of his most famous illustrations of his con-
ception of economic rationality (Bourdieu 1977a)), reveal the instrumental,
or even practical, relationship that he maintains with what he believes is,
above all, a set of intellectual tools, that is, scientific capital.
Consequently, none of Bourdieu’s studies propose a systematic discus-
sion of Marxist theory (nor of Marxist works, even though he cites many

1
 This text is based on numerous discussions and readings, in particular Mauger (2012),
Wacquant (2002), Gilles (2014).
 11  BOURDIEU, MARX, AND THE ECONOMY  251

Marxists such as Lukács, and especially Thompson and Hobsbawm2).

However, during his most inventive theoretical discussions, he attempts to
incorporate Marxian elements into new constructions centred on the con-
cept of symbolic power.
A brief and non-exhaustive inventory of Bourdieu’s use of Marxist con-
cepts and references reveals:

• Concepts designating classes: proletariat, sub-proletariat, bourgeoi-

sie, petty-bourgeoisie.
• Marxist texts, notably in the first edition of Le Métier de sociologue
(The Craft of Sociology) (but some argue also in the second), and in
the references to a conception of Marxian social science that also
converges with that of Durkheim and Weber (around the “presup-
position of non-awareness”), which we find, for example, in
Invitation to A Reflexive Sociology in 1992 (Bourdieu and Wacquant
1992: 72).
• Regular references to the Theses on Feuerbach in Trois Études
d’ethnologie kabyle (Anthropological Study of Kabylia, which is the
last part of Outline of a Theory of Practice) (p. 100 of the French text
in particular), but especially highlighted in Outline of a Theory of
Practice (Bourdieu 1977c), which was drawn directly from the Theses
on Feuerbach. These same references are cited again in 1992  in
Invitation to a Reflexive Sociology where they are used to develop the
concept of the habitus.
• Several references to Marx’s analyses of labour and to the notion of
capital, first in the conclusion of Outline of a Theory of Practice (see
below) and in various later texts.
• The concept of “classification struggles,” developed in particular in
Distinction (Bourdieu 2010).
• Marx’s and Engels’s texts on culture cited in Distinction.
• The critical analysis of the “dominant ideology” and of the division
of labour of domination, in particular in 1976 in the article “La pro-
duction de l’idéologie dominante” (The Production of the Dominant
Ideology) (Bourdieu and Boltanski 1976).
• A social and historical analysis of the State from a Marxist perspec-
tive, in the published course given at the Collège de France
(Bourdieu 2012).

2
 Bourdieu was a close friend of Eric Hobsbawm from the 1960s until the early 2000s.
252  F. LEBARON

The last pages of Outline of a Theory of Practice revolve around a con-

frontation, not with Marx but with what characterizes his views on pre-­
capitalist economies. Put differently, it focuses on economism, first when it
gives a biased representation of societies in which the differentiation
between fields fails to lead to the constitution of an autonomous economic
order; this would justify largely leaving aside a set of “purely” symbolic
issues. The error here has nothing to do with the objective description of
the relationships of production proposed by Marx and, above all by
“Marxists” (a term he usually introduces with negative connotations).
Rather, it is due to the illusion that involves presenting these relationships
that are standard elements of the economic analysis of developed societ-
ies…economic analysis as though they exist autonomously in traditional
society, whereas—on the contrary—the two components (economic ratio-
nality and symbolic practice) must be grasped continuously and
interdependently.
Second, the critical discussion reflects on the relationships between
symbolic capital and economic capital, notably in terms of their ambiva-
lence and duality, thus building on certain analyses developed in La repro-
duction (Bourdieu, and Passeron 1970), then in the article entitled in
French Le pouvoir symbolique (Symbolic Power) published in Les Annales
in 1977 (Bourdieu 1977b), and in various texts dealing, in particular, with
the “double nature of work” or with the concept of capital. In these works,
Bourdieu proposes a general science of the economy of practices that is
capable of integrating the gains of economic or “materialist” analyses
(which may be referred to as “à la Marx” or even “à la Becker” in a differ-
ent context). This general science is centred on strictly economic capital,
and on the anthropological and sociological analyses which give symbolic
capital its rightful place (considered as primarily based on the logic of hon-
our). The relationship between the two is extremely complex in “pre-­
capitalist” societies insofar as it is mediated by practical relationships with
the social world. Symbolic capital produces its own effect, notably one
that conceals economic power relations, but its functioning depends on the
existence of other types of capital, especially economic capital.
The originality of the theory of symbolic capital (or symbolic power) is
such that associating it with economic theories, notably Marxist theories,
raises a number of challenges. One of the solutions proposed by Bourdieu
“in reality” suggests that the objectification process driven by the
 11  BOURDIEU, MARX, AND THE ECONOMY  253

empirical economic analysis3 should be viewed as a moment—necessarily

partial—within a general analysis. This analysis consists, in particular, of
determining the state of forces in the strictly economic sector, with the
sociological analysis, centring on symbolic relationships, playing the role
of completing and connecting the whole. Ultimately, it is not a question of
mobilizing an economic theory, strictly speaking, as though this concept
were not in itself problematic, a view shared by the Durkheimian tradition
which replaces it with economic sociology (regarding these studies under-
taken in the 1960s, Bourdieu speaks of economic anthropology).
This sheds light on Bourdieu’s obvious interest in legitimizing dis-
courses (“sociodicy”) in all their forms and their contribution to the study
of social relationships. Thus, from the 1970s, Bourdieu attempts to inte-
grate symbolic relationships into the analysis of class structures, in terms of
their diversity and historical variability. Luc Boltanski’s work on manage-
rial executives is a perfect illustration of the socio-historical inventiveness
required for this historico-constructivist undertaking, which Bourdieu
formalizes in his article entitled in French Espace social et genèse des classes
(Bourdieu 1991) by drawing, among others, on the studies of
E. P. Thompson (Bourdieu, 1984). In a way, this article proposes a new
connection: the social space is characterized by objective distributions
(where one may find the “objective conditions”) of capital (economic,
cultural, and social) and, at the same time, by incessant symbolic construc-
tion, notably discursive, based on these conditions. Thus, the group—as a
class (“a class for itself,” in the Marxist tradition)—is not constructed from
nothing; rather, it is partially “open” and permanently at stake in symbolic
struggles subjected to specific variations, according to a practical logic.
The analysis can also be broken down according to the particular field
considered, which always provides an opportunity to combine objective
inequalities and symbolic issues. This re-interpretation of the theories of
stratification makes it possible to overcome the opposition between objec-
tivism and constructivism, which continues to structure the field.
The concept of “class struggle” is also reviewed in this perspective: the
“class struggle” and “symbolic struggle” concepts derived/adapted from

3
 Bourdieu has never ceased to soak himself in empirical economics texts, such as the stud-
ies undertaken by various French institutes, the work of François Morin, the studies carried
out by a research group on savings, the Marxist studies of François Chesnais on globalization
in the 1990s, and so on. There are very explicit traces of his readings in the references of
Distinction or of The Social structures of the economy.
254  F. LEBARON

Marx allow Bourdieu to posit that there is a conflict inherent in the ordi-
nary functioning of the social world, all the while maintaining a “dialecti-
cal” link with the objective data and regularities highlighted by economic
and social statistics. The “representation” of dominated groups (in the
double sense: to represent them, stand for them, reveal them, etc.) is
therefore a fundamental issue. While the issue has been neglected, it has
continued to divide theoreticians and historians of the labour movement,
notably Marxists and anarchists, to whom Bourdieu seems to implicitly
attach himself in his analysis of labour parties (see below). In each field,
the struggles become, above all, competitive struggles between individu-
als, but they can also be transformed into collective struggles.
This complex theoretical construction—which is, strictly speaking,
without an economic theory—therefore largely ignores the classic Marxist
theory question of value, to which Durkheimians provide, in certain
respects, a “sociological solution” consistent with Bourdieu’s views: value
is not simply the result of objective data, even if these data are always pres-
ent in the background, but is also the product of a process of social valua-
tion which, as Bourdieu argues, is essentially based on symbolic activities
(and is thus partly socio-linguistic).

Changing Contexts That Reveal

Persistent Ambivalence
Bourdieu’s scientific trajectory is located between the field of the social
sciences and the wider intellectual field, an area that has been undergoing
considerable transformation. This may largely explain what may be per-
ceived as fluctuations in his relationship to Marx and, perhaps even more
so, to Marxists. Rather than simple opportunistic or cyclical oscillations,
the changing positions revealed by several “points of contact” between
Bourdieu and Marx/Marxism/Marxists reveal a form of structural ambiv-
alence reflected in an attachment—one that is both close and distant—
which takes various forms depending on the period.

A Social and Political Trajectory

Bourdieu’s relationship to Marx may have something to do with his social
and political trajectory: the son of a provincial postmaster who was a leftist
and socially committed activist, Bourdieu would pursue his studies at the
 11  BOURDIEU, MARX, AND THE ECONOMY  255

École normale supérieure in an anti-communist left-wing environment.

Later, in Algeria, he is close to the so-called liberal intellectuals who reject
an exclusive engagement with the armed struggle (supported by the
French “porteurs de valisae”—literally “suitcase carriers,” “fellow-­
travelers,” behind the “Jeanson network”). In his first articles, he chal-
lenges the romantic-revolutionary analyses by Sartre and Fanon on the
Algerian revolution and supports what may be referred to as a sociological
realism committed to revolution (Bourdieu 2002).
In the context of the protests of the 1960s, both Bourdieu and Passeron
play an essential role insofar as their analyses in the book Les Héritiers (The
Inheritors) leads to the denunciation of social inequalities in the school
system. They encourage/lead to many Marxist protesters embracing soci-
ological studies and mobilizing them in the public space.
From the second half of the 1970s, when Marxism comes under violent
attack in the intellectual field, as shown in particular in Christofferson
(2009), Bourdieu is relatively in tune with the evolution of the Socialist
Party, which has maintained a pragmatic relationship with Marxism; some
of its members refer to it very explicitly, others much less directly, and oth-
ers are much more critical (in particular, Michel Rocard, whom Bourdieu
knows personally). In the 1980s, he works on two occasions with the
socialist government, resulting in a shift away from any radical changes
from 1982 to 1983 and its breaking off its alliance with the French
Communist Party in 1984. This proximity is forged after he criticizes,
alongside Foucault and the Confédération française démocratique des tra-
vailleurs (the predominantly non-Marxist workers’ union), the govern-
ment’s overly conciliatory positions regarding the events in Poland. This
is primarily reflected in an adherence to “pro-European” theses, albeit
subtly, particularly during the 1992 Maastricht Treaty referendum. The
disappointment arising from this cooperation also leads to the questioning
of the results of the economic and social policies implemented between
1988 and 1993.
Published in 1993  in French, La misère du monde (The Weight of the
World) is the first book in which Bourdieu’s sociological analyses begin to
focus on neoliberal policies and on the transformations of world capital-
ism. This leads him to revert to his earlier studies undertaken in the 1960s
and to adopt a viewpoint that more clearly supports the “social move-
ment,” thus leading to a new dialogue that is more peaceful but also more
complex, with Marxist trends within the social sciences.
256  F. LEBARON

Key Moments of “confrontation”

The first phase of intense confrontation takes place between 1964 and
1975. Althusser invites Bourdieu to present the analyses of Les Héritiers at
the École normale supérieure de la rue d’Ulm (ENS), an occasion that
leads to a cordial, albeit relatively distant, relationship. The publication of
an article by Althusser in Bourdieu’s first edition in French of Le Métier de
sociologue (The Craft of Sociology) in 1968 clearly reflects this relationship.
Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet, students of Althusser at ENS, are
“converted to sociology” primarily by Bourdieu himself, and act as a link
between the two men. However, they denounce the “petty-bourgeois”
nature of the work undertaken by Bourdieu and Passeron in their 1971
book L’École capitaliste en France (The Capitalist School in France).
Indeed, this book explicitly claims to adopt the Marxism–Leninism–
Maoism philosophy. During this period, the rapprochement between the
two is therefore accompanied by an intense controversy, reflected in the
disappearance of Althusser’s text and of other “Marxist” texts from the
second French edition of Le Métier de sociologue (The Craft of Sociology) in
1972. Within the span of four years, therefore, there is a shift from the
development of closer ties to a fierce rivalry, and this is all the more signifi-
cant because Marxist discourse and activism are at their peak in universi-
ties (see also Bourdieu 1975); this is clearly illustrated by the case of the
University of Vincennes and, in particular, by the undergraduate pro-
grammes in philosophy and human sciences (Soulié et al. 2012).
Until 1975, Bourdieu is primarily occupied by the collective study on
what is then called the “Taste survey,” which is the basis of Distinction,
and by the launch of the Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales journal. In
one of the first articles published in this journal, he levels harsh criticism at
Etienne Balibar, Althusser’s co-author, using a Marxist lens and a provoca-
tive comic strip. This clearly reflects the rejection of any form of scholastic
philosophy with a profound contempt for empirical social sciences, and
shows, already, a penchant for sociological and critical discourse analysis
(philosophical in this case). It must be noted, however, that Bourdieu
draws on Marx to criticize Balibar, which is also revealing of a concealed
struggle for ownership: the Marx chosen here is a pamphleteer and polem-
icist, and it is from him that Bourdieu frequently draws his inspiration in
his texts, especially when he plays around with wording and attacks
 11  BOURDIEU, MARX, AND THE ECONOMY  257

opponents or rivals.4 Similarly, Bourdieu never ceases to refer to certain

Marxist historians, notably Thompson and Hobsbawm, in whom he sees
allies in the face of Philosopher-King contenders and of the abstraction of
“ideological state apparatuses.”
At the same time, the confrontation with Althusser’s theoretical archi-
tecture does not imply a pure and simple rejection. In an interview with
Michel Simon and Antoine Casanova, published in October 1975 in La
nouvelle critique, that is, the theoretical journal of the communist party,
Bourdieu evokes the concept of the “field of class struggle” as some sort
of “final resort” of a social space which he views as multidimensional.5
When field theory was undergoing further formalization at the turn of the
1970s, several sources of inspiration—naturally, Weber’s Sociology of
Religions, as well as the geometric analysis of data—thus coexist.
A second phase of the relationship between Bourdieu and Marxism
develops between 1976 and the beginning of the 1990s. Far from disap-
pearing, the discussions focus on issues that have long mattered for Marxist
theorization, notably the reproduction and legitimation of the dominant
classes and the globalization of economies.6 In the article “La production
de l’idéologie dominante” (The Production of Dominant Ideology), writ-
ten by Bourdieu and Boltanski in 1976 (Bourdieu and Boltanski 1976),
there is a clear Marxian inspiration which is reflected, beyond the very
notion of “dominant ideology,” by an objectification of certain discursive
techniques aimed at legitimizing the new ruling elites. This article reveals
4
 A specific study should be devoted to these controversial attacks, which appear primarily
in the footnotes, and to the preliminary rebuttals of adverse positions, which are quite fre-
quent in Bourdieu’s work and which, in certain respects, link this work to a tradition of lively
intellectual debate revolving around intellectual Marxism, as illustrated, for instance, by
Lenin’s book Materialism and Empirio-criticism. This explains in part why researchers who
are more or less right-wingers tend repeatedly to equate Bourdieu purely and simply with
Marxism, or even with Marxism-Leninism, and to replace scientific discussion with ideologi-
cal condemnation. Indeed, these researchers forget the close ties between the Bourdieu of
the 1960s and Raymond Aron, a symbolic figure of a form of anti-Marxism (on this point,
see Joly 2012).
5
 See the publication of this interview in Questions de sociologie (Sociological Questions)
(Bourdieu 1980). There is a relatively close formulation at the very end of Outline of a Theory
of Practice, where the “final resort” becomes a “final analysis,” which leads to the admission
that symbolic capital ultimately depends on economic capital. This was in 1972.
6
 The globalization issue is at the centre of Marxist economics, as is that of financialization.
In The Social Structures of the Economy, Bourdieu refers to François Chesnais, a Marxist
economist with Trotskyist training, who worked for the OECD. One of Chesnais’s works is
published in the Raisons d’Agir collection founded by Bourdieu after 1995.
258  F. LEBARON

a perspective that is close to French discourse analysis, which was itself

originally inspired by the Althusserian variant of Marxism as well as by
Foucault (for research on this: see Temmar et  al. 2013). Similarly, the
article on “employers” written with Monique de Saint-Martin, goes
straight to the heart of the discussion on the nature of French capitalism
and incites dialogue with non-Marxist economic historians such as Maurice
Lévy-Leboyer.
In addition to the studies on the dominant economic classes, which
provide empirical analyses that draw the reflections on the transformations
of French capitalism (which during this period shifts away from strict state
capitalism and associates itself with an increasingly global and financial
dynamic), there are more theoretical analyses. These analyses initiate a
dialogue with the theoreticians of socialism on the structuring of the
workers’ movement, “real socialism,” and so on. The results are published,
in particular, in the journals Actes de la recherche, or in Liber, revue europée-
nne des livres. This allows Bourdieu to develop an “independent left” posi-
tion, fully in line with the collapse of “real socialism” in Eastern Europe
and with the hopes of democratic reconstruction that this collapse arouses
on the left as well.7 Claiming to reconnect with the “libertarian tradition
of the left,” he thus keeps his distance from “organic” intellectuals and
from Marxist political parties. In a 1992 interview with Loïc Wacquant,
which would later lead to the work Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (in
French Réponses), he nevertheless remarks that he “has never quoted Marx
as much as I do today, meaning at a time when he has become the scape-
goat for all the misfortunes of the social world—no doubt a manifestation
of the reluctant dispositions which led me to quote Weber at a time when
Marxist orthodoxy was trying to ostracize him” (p. 102).
A final, more peaceful, period of confrontation with the Marxist and
post-Marxist left clearly begins in December 1995, following the success
of The Weight of the World in France in 1993 (Bourdieu et al. 1999). The
ideological shifts following the fall of the “Soviet bloc” profoundly modify
the French and European political and activist landscape and there is a
marked decline in “Party intellectuals.” There are also various internal
transformations within the Communist and Trotskyist left, a renewal

7
 In particular, the postscript to the Rules of Art, in 1992 for the French edition, sets out
Bourdieu’s position with regard to the defence of social conquests: particularly in the most
autonomous fields and in the context of the globalization of economic power:
Bourdieu (2018).
 11  BOURDIEU, MARX, AND THE ECONOMY  259

of critical economics outside party frameworks, and perhaps, most impor-

tantly, the emergence of new social movements (protest unions from the
left, such as Confédération française démocratique des travailleurs, move-
ments of those “without,” such as homeless, asylum-seekers or unem-
ployed, farmers’ confederations, and anti-World Trade Organization
coordination, etc.) which desire a radical and pragmatic transformation of
the economic system from an international perspective.
This period is made more complex because of Bourdieu’s position as a
central figure in the nascent “alter-globalization” protest, at least in
Europe, and because of the diversification of political and intellectual
forces which later come together under the “alter-globalization move-
ment” (see Sommier 2008).
There are, however, growing exchanges between researchers in social
sciences, and these are marked by their links with Marxism in very differ-
ent ways. Marxism, in this period, is undergoing a process of seculariza-
tion and transformation associated with the decline or internal evolution
of the organizations that had adopted its doctrine (in France, the French
Communist Party is the best example). As a result, many Marxist writers
move closer to other social science trends, thus contributing to the devel-
opment of a secondary space of journals, networks, and groups located
between the academic field and the political field in the broad sense.
Among these are the Actuel Marx journal, edited in particular by Jacques
Bidet, and the “Marx International” congresses at the University of
Nanterre.
During this period, a new space, with new reference points, has been
progressively established within the social sciences, notably within the field
of sociology. While Marxist sociology continues to be dynamic in the
English-speaking world, and especially in the United States  (Burawoy
2010), it is clear that Bourdieu’s influence is everywhere, including in the
fields of social stratification, economic sociology, and even the sociology of
work, where Marxist trends are always very much present.

References
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 CHAPTER 12

Marx and Bourdieu: From the Economy

to the Economies

Alicia B. Gutiérrez

The economic is never absent from any field however autonomous—

whether the field is religious, juridical or literary. It is present, but it
cannot appear in its in own name. This is important: in religion, they
don’t speak of the salary of the priest but of ‘offering’.
—Bourdieu (2021: 48)

Introduction
The analogies with economics and, further, the idea that there is a homol-
ogy between the different social fields and the market, has generated sev-
eral criticisms to Bourdieu’s perspective. With more or less harshness,
many authors believe that Bourdieu’s position entails some form of eco-
nomic determinism and/or an economistic vision of the social world,
whose source of inspiration would be neoclassical economics (Jenkins
1982; Honneth 1986; Caillé 1992, 1994; Alexander 1995). Frédéric
Lebaron (2004a) systematizes the objections to Bourdieu’s theory of
practice, subdividing them into three groups. Some authors accuse the

A. B. Gutiérrez (*)
CONICET-National University of Córdoba, Córdoba, Argentina

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 263

Switzerland AG 2022
G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and
Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_12
264  A. B. GUTIÉRREZ

Bourdieusian perspective of being “economistic,” and that neoclassical

economics influenced Bourdieu. Others argue that the economic analogy
constitutes a mechanical transposition of the deterministic metaphor, as in
the Marxist tradition. Finally, others positively value some empirical appli-
cation, although they note the need for limitations of its use. But beyond
the qualifier of “economistic,” there is another aspect in question. It is
about the relationship between Marx and Bourdieu, which has occupied a
certain space among the debates of different fields of intellectual produc-
tion. Wacquant (1996), for example, argues that Bourdieu’s alternation
between respect and critique in his approach to Marx, hides the depth and
breadth of the common base shared by all critical sociologies. Taking
Marx and Bourdieu, but also Durkheim and Weber, Wacquant points out
three major points of agreement: the rejection of pure theory, the rela-
tional conception, and the agonistic conception of the social. Within this
framework, I have expanded the analysis of these dimensions, where pos-
sible, to find links between the Bourdieusian and Marxist perspectives.
Finding these links implies simultaneously approaching and in some cases,
breaking with the Durkheimian and Weberian perspectives (Gutiérrez
2003). This interpretation is also predominant among certain Latin
American authors, who are proponents of Bourdieu’s work.
First of all, the Argentine Néstor García Canclini, who lives in Mexico,
stands out as one of the most important promoters of Bourdieusian work
in Latin America. His extensive introduction entitled “La sociología de la
cultura de Pierre Bourdieu” (The Sociology of Culture of Pierre Bourdieu)
(1990), preceded an edited collection of Bourdieu’s texts that has become
well known in the intellectual circuits of the region.1 García Canclini con-
siders Bourdieu’s relationship with Marxism controversial on at least four
issues: (a) the links between production, circulation and consumption; (b)
the labour theory of value; (c) the articulation of the economic and the
symbolic and (d) the ultimately determining economic element and social
class concepts. While addressing them, he proposes in his introduction
two very suggestive premises from the section titles of the article: “¿Un
marxismo weberiano?” [A Weberian Marxism?] (García Canclini 1990:
12–17) and “Recordar a Marx por sus olvidos” [Remembering Marx by
his omissions] (García Canclini 1990: 43–50), to conclude:

1
 It is about Sociología y Cultura (Bourdieu 1990f) that, with certain modification, includes
texts from Questions de sociologie (1984).
 12  MARX AND BOURDIEU: FROM THE ECONOMY TO THE ECONOMIES  265

Perhaps, one of Bourdieu’s key merits was to remember Marx by the things
he forgot, extending Capital’s method to the areas of European society that
this book omitted. (García Canclini 1990: 47)

The Bolivian academic Álvaro García Linera is undoubtedly another

key reference-point in this debate. In a classic book for those who study
his work, García Linera (2000) mentions the Marx-Bourdieu relation to
raise the Bourdieusian problem of social space and symbolic structures. In
this text, he analyses a central notion: the concept of capital and its differ-
ent forms. Much as in Marx’s theory, capital in Bourdieu is a social rela-
tionship, but he extends the classic interpretation of economic capital to
other kinds of goods and social life spheres.2 He warns:

To avoid falling into paradoxes such as that all people should be considered
‘capitalist’, or that ‘capitalism’ was a transhistorical social regime, we must
not forget that in Bourdieu’s view capital is not abstract labor (value) that
valorizes itself (as Marx contends); but a social good whose property can
confer some type of benefit in the most general sense of terms. (García
Linera 2000: 55)

In addition, García Linera points out that understanding the complex-

ity of Bourdieusian propositions requires remembering the following defi-
nitions of Weber: the consideration of perceived monetary income and its
structure as indicators of economic capital; the conceptualization of cul-
tural capital and its place in the definition of class, and the symbolic capital
(social honour) as another indicator of social inequality.
Finally, Denis Baranger, Argentinian sociologist and author of
Epistemología y metodología en la obra de Pierre Bourdieu [Epistemology
and methodology in the work of Pierre Bourdieu] (2004), points out that
the “economistic” accusation of Bourdieu’s theory also comes from a
reading of his work as Althusserian. Jeffery Alexander is the main protago-
nist of this portrayal with his argument that Bourdieu is “economistic and
his work highlights the continuity of Marx’s line of thought, specially
under Althusser’s interpretation” (Baranger 2004: 21–22).
Baranger suggests that certain words and expressions used by Bourdieu
can be traced to Althusserian language. But he points out that actually,
those are expressions “from a certain intellectual atmosphere where

2
 This is also the interpretation made by Gutiérrez (1995). (Cf. Specially in pp. 26–30).
266  A. B. GUTIÉRREZ

Althusser belonged” and not “the indicator of an authentic theoretical

convergence with him” (Baranger 2004: 26). Furthermore, he adds the
need to remember that much of Althusser’s work clearly comes from other
sources: for example, from Bachelard and Canguilhem, both of whom
were Bourdieu’s teachers. At the same time, as this essay will point out
later, Baranger proposes that in the Bourdieusian notion of “field” it is
possible to observe simultaneously the footprints of Weberian and Marxist
thinking.
In agreement with these lines of argument, this chapter assumes that
Pierre Bourdieu’s perspective is strongly inspired by historic materialism
but at the same time shows the importance of other intellectual debts.
Under this premise, this essay will pose the main traits of the Bourdieusian
concept of “economy of practices,” pointing out the links with the Marxist
perspective and the contribution of other sources.

A Double Historicized Objectivity

Bourdieu argues about the possibility of sociology as an objective science
“because of the existence of external relationships which are necessary and
independent of individual wills” (Bourdieu 1990a: 2). He used almost the
same words that Marx used in the Preface to the A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy, when he asserted that:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite
relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of produc-
tion appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces
of production. (Marx 1977)

Indeed, when Bourdieu defines his approach as that of a “constructivist

structuralism or of structuralist constructivism” (Bourdieu 1990c: 123),
he proposes a vision of “economy of practices” that has many points in
common with the Marxist perspective. First of all, it implies the recogni-
tion of objective relations that have a social genesis. Secondly, he poses an
interpretation of social processes within their historic dimensions and the
dialectic relation between objectivity and subjectivity: as “externalization
of internality” and as “internalization of externality” (Bourdieu 1990a: 5).
In a well-known passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte, Marx specifically refers to the weight that the past exerts on
men’s present. Even though it is true “men make their own history,” it is
 12  MARX AND BOURDIEU: FROM THE ECONOMY TO THE ECONOMIES  267

also accurate they cannot choose the circumstances in which they act since
they are the result of the past weighing on the present “as a nightmare.”3
He also wrote it in the Preface to the First German Edition of Capital
Volume 1, when he pointed out:

Alongside the modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, aris-
ing from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, with their
inevitable train of social and political anachronisms. We suffer not only from
the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif! (Marx 1887: 7)

Bourdieu explicitly appeals to this last phrase (in French, the rest of the
original is in German) to title one of his articles in 1980. In this text, and
in the same direction as Marx, Bourdieu’s talk about the several ways in
which historical forces affect the present. He points out that the original
relation with the social world is a: “possessive relation, which implies the
possession of the possessor by his possessions. When the heritage appro-
priates the inheritor, just as Marx says, the inheritor can appropriate the
heritage”4 (Bourdieu 1980: 7).
In 1997 he resumes this idea in Pascalian Meditations:

The doxic relation to the native world is a relationship of belonging and

possession in which the body possessed by history appropriates immediately
the things inhabited by the same history. Only when the heritage has taken
over the inheritor can the inheritor take over the heritage. And this appro-
priation of the inheritor by the heritage, the precondition for the appropria-
tion of the heritage by the inheritor (which has nothing inevitable about it),
takes place under the combined effect of the conditionings inscribed in the
position of inheritor and the pedagogic action of his predecessors, them-
selves possessed possessors. (Bourdieu 2000: 152)

For both Marx and Bourdieu, social life shows as a double historicized
objectivity that translates into relations and things that are external to
agents. However, at the same time, these relations are incorporated into
biological individuals.

3
 “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make
it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and
transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on
the brains of the living” (Marx 1937: 5).
4
 Translated from the original French by the author.
268  A. B. GUTIÉRREZ

Marx, as it is well known, shows the close relation between the exis-
tence of social conditions and feelings, illusions, and ways of thinking:

Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of exis-
tence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed senti-
ments, illusions, modes of thought, and views of life. The entire class creates
and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the correspond-
ing social relations. The single individual, who derives them through tradi-
tion and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and the
starting point of his activity. (Marx 1937: 22)

In the same vein, Bourdieu opposes what he calls “a Machiavellian

vision of history,”5 characterized by a teleological illusion. This vision
assumes all actions are a by-product of conscious calculations, as in the
goal-oriented strategies pursued by great figures or, even worse, by insti-
tutions that are personified as historical subjects. On that basis, the
Bourdieusian perspective proposes that history is a consequence of: “an
almost miraculous encounter” between objective external structures (the
field or the history as a material thing) and biological individuals’ incorpo-
rated structures (the habitus or history as body). Ultimately, social life is
the result of “ontological complicity” between a field and habitus
(Bourdieu 1980).

The Struggle: The Engine of Social Life

As Wacquant (1996) observed, Marx and Bourdieu share an agonistic
conception of the social world: the capitalist world in Marx and the rela-
tively autonomous social spaces (fields) in Bourdieu.
Marx and Engels start The Communist Manifesto with a startling thesis:
class struggles are the engine of history: “The history of all hitherto exist-
ing society is the history of class struggles” (Marx and Engels 1969: 14).
In the same way, Bourdieu affirms that “the principle of the perpetual
motion that agitates the field does not lie in some first motionless motor,—
here the Sun King-, but in the very struggle” (Bourdieu 1980: 7). The
game traps the different agents, they have an illusio. This illusio is at the
same time the beginning of the game and the consequence of their

5
 This and other aspects related to a Bourdieusian analysis of history is considered in
Gutiérrez (2016).
 12  MARX AND BOURDIEU: FROM THE ECONOMY TO THE ECONOMIES  269

development. Even more, once they are immersed in the game, there is no
way out but to get out of the game, which would take them to ataraxia
(indifference) and sentence them to a type of social death.
However, while the historic materialism framework identifies environ-
ments of social differentiation and their relative autonomy, the ultimately
determining economic element subordinates these processes. This leads to
such claims as:

Where there is division of labour on a social scale there is also mutual inde-
pendence among the different sections of work. In the last instance produc-
tion is the decisive factor. (Engels 1968)

Neither intentionalist nor utilitarian, Bourdieu’s approach overcomes

the false dichotomy between the economic and the non-economic. He
thus shows what economism cannot see: that the different domains of
practice have “an economy in itself and not for itself” (Bourdieu 1990b:
113). The origin of each of the relatively autonomous universes of
Bourdieu comes from the historical differentiation of powers and the cir-
cuits of legitimacy. Indeed, in the basis of the field theory, we find the
phenomenon that Spencer, Durkheim, and Weber had already pointed
out: “the social world is the site of a process of progressive differentiation”
(Bourdieu 1998: 83):

The evolution of societies tends to make universes (which I call fields)

emerge which are autonomous and have their own laws. (…) Thus, we have
social universes which have a fundamental law, a nomos which is independent
from the laws of other universes, which are auto-nomes, which evaluate what
is done in them, the stakes at play, according to principles and criteria that
are irreducible to those of other universes. (Bourdieu 1998: 83–84)

Even the economic field6 derives from the same processes. The problem
of falling into economism comes up when we pretend to transfer the

6
 In the case of the economic field, Lebaron points out two fundamental issues: first, that
it is the historical result of an autonomization process of a social order (the economic one)
and of a specific illusion, a particular belief in the value of that game. Second, that economic
domination “imposes the very legitimacy of domination” and the dominant is not content
with appropriating most of the wealth produced (surplus value, in the Marxist case) but
rather “imposes on the dominated the vision of himself and his own reality that is his own
gaze” (Lebaron 2004b: 133).
270  A. B. GUTIÉRREZ

nomos, particular of the field (“business is business”) to the diverse social

universes. Even more, Bourdieu points out:

the constitution of a science of mercantile relationships which, inasmuch as

it takes for granted the very foundations of the order it claims to analyze—
private property, profit, wage labor, etc.—is not even a science of the field of
economic production, has prevented the constitution of a general science of
the economy of practices, which would treat mercantile exchange as a par-
ticular case of exchange in all its forms. (Bourdieu 1986: 242)

In other words, the Bourdieusian economy of practices distinguishes

itself from historical materialism by extending the concepts of interest and
capital to other social fields rather than the economic (Gutiérrez 1995). As
forms of capital diversify and autonomous fields multiply; tensions and
power relations grow, and threaten conflicts: diverse forms of capital play
the game of domination and their carriers struggle to impose the legiti-
macy of their resources, especially in the field of power. The capital-field
dynamic historicization is fundamental, and its simultaneous differentia-
tion constitutes the most important principles of distinction among the
different forms of society (Bourdieu 2021).

Capital and Capitals
A characteristic of the Bourdieusian notion of capital that helps to link his
concept to the Marxist tradition is the idea that all capital is accumulated
work. However, as Garcia Quesada points out, for Bourdieu, “work is not
merely an activity that produces goods and services—that is, [it] produces
surplus value” but he “widens the concept to include aspects beyond those
traditionally studied by political economy” (García Quesada 2009: 60).
Indeed, Bourdieu points out:

Capital is accumulated labor (in its materialized form or its ‘incorporated’,

embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis
by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in
the form of reified or living labor. (Bourdieu 1986: 241)

The acquisition of any form of capital, as much as its reconversion in

other different forms, assumes a certain waste of energy and the availabil-
ity of time to do that work. This process, that seems more evident in eco-
nomic capital accumulation, is also present in cultural capital accumulation:
 12  MARX AND BOURDIEU: FROM THE ECONOMY TO THE ECONOMIES  271

for example, in its form of incorporated capital, it demands time and

bodily exposure, as tanning (Bourdieu 1979). The same happens with
social capital that requires an unceasing effort of sociability, a continuous
series of exchanges, with the consequent expenditure of time and energy
(Bourdieu 1986). Also, symbolic capital (although in part it is transmitted
symbolically, as the name suggests) is a form of capital acquired over time
and specially with a personal input of time (Bourdieu 2021). On the other
hand, this accumulated energy is social energy, is registered in objective
structures, and the logic of its production guarantees the immanence of
the social order:

The universal equivalent, the measure of all equivalences, is nothing other

than labor-time (in the widest sense); and the conservation of social energy
through all its conversions is verified if, in each case, one takes into account
both the labor-time accumulated in the form of capital and the labor-time
needed to transform it from one type into another. (Bourdieu 1986: 153)

Yet Bourdieu’s capitals have homologous logics and while their ways of
functioning could be interconnected in different moments, they never
lose their relative autonomy. As Alonso reminds us, talking about “coun-
terpart” logics does not imply reducing them to only one: and “mean-
while, economic capital logic is that of material benefit; the symbolic
capital logic is that of distinction” (2002: 20).

The Denial of the Economy and “Interest

in Disinterestedness”

A fundamental aspect of the Bourdieusian economy of practices is the

apparent paradox of thinking that it is possible to have an “interest in dis-
interestedness.” Indeed, when Bourdieu talks about “the economy of
symbolic goods,” he refers to certain social spaces, as in the world of art,
religion, science and politics, that reject or censure economic interest,
demanding the collective denial (or rejection) of economic values (Bourdieu
2000). In these spheres, the provision of other benefits—especially sym-
bolic ones—reward or compensate for “disinterest”—in the strictly eco-
nomic sense.
These universes actively or passively hide economic truths, and rest
upon the taboo of making things explicit. Because of that, practices and
discourses are ambiguous, “double sided”: although they are not
272  A. B. GUTIÉRREZ

hypocrites: they are based on denial. And the work of denial is successful
because it is collective and founded in the orchestration of the habitus of
agents who participate in those games and share what is at stake. Agents
who participate in these universes have an illusio: they believe in the value
of what is at stake and in the legitimacy of the stakes. As a consequence, as
Bourdieu points out in Forms of Capital. General Sociology (2021), eco-
nomic interest is just a particular case:

Interest as operated by societies that are rational (for Weber) or capitalist

(for Marx), that is, the calculating societies where economics is established
as an autonomous field with its own laws, is one particular case in a universe
of possible interest, within which may be found scientific, literary, political
or charitable interest among others. (Bourdieu 2021: 100–101)

It is not possible to reduce all interests to economic interest stricto

sensu, but interests mobilize agents as much as material interest. In this
regard, Bourdieu observes that:

The most striking example is that of the artistic field which is constituted in
the nineteenth century by taking the reverse of economic law as its funda-
mental law. (Bourdieu 2000: 84)

Indeed, in the context of a process that started with European

Renaissance and ended in the second half of the nineteenth century with
what is known as “art for art’s sake,” lucrative and specifically artistic ends
of the artistic universe are dissociated. One example of that process is the
opposition between “commercial art” and “pure art.” And the only form
of true art, according to the specific laws of these autonomous fields, com-
pletely rejects commercial ends. That is to say, the field opposes the subor-
dination of the artist and his production to any external demands
(economical, political and religious) and their sanctions:

It is constituted on the basis of a fundamental law which is the negation (or

disavowal) of the economy: let no one enter here if he or she has commercial
concerns. (Bourdieu 2000: 84)

What circulates as specific power in the artistic field—as in any other

market of symbolic goods, that is to say, any other social universe founded
in the taboo of making things explicit in their economic truth, and in the
 12  MARX AND BOURDIEU: FROM THE ECONOMY TO THE ECONOMIES  273

collective denial of what the misrecognition implies and the recognition of

the supporting mechanisms—is symbolic capital:

Symbolic capital is an ordinary property (physicals strength, wealth, warlike

valor, etc.) which, perceived by social agents endowed with the categories of
perception and appreciation permitting them to perceive, know and recog-
nize it, becomes symbolically efficient, like a veritable magical power; a
property which, because it responds to socially constituted “collective
expectations” and beliefs, exercises a sort of action from a distance, without
physical contact. (Bourdieu 1998: 102)

The Legitimacy of Domination: Symbolic Violence

According to Bourdieu, symbolic capital is recognition, consecration,
legitimacy. Symbolic capital is also symbolic power; it is the particular
force that certain agents who exercise symbolic violence have as their dispo-
sition. It is about a form of violence that operates on an agent or a group
of agents with their complicity. It is soft, euphemized, violence and because
of that it is socially acceptable. As their mechanism of exercises are misrec-
ognized, it is not seen as arbitrary, and because of that it is recognized.
Empirically identified at first with the school environment (Bourdieu and
Passeron 1977), the:

symbolic violence accomplishes itself through an act of cognition and of

misrecognition that lies beyond—or beneath—the controls of consciousness
and will, in the obscurities of the schemata of habitus. (Bourdieu and
Wacquant 1992: 171–172)

It is based on symbolic power, as the power to constitute what is given

by the enunciation of making agents see, making them believe, of confirm-
ing or transforming their world vision and in this way the action upon the
world, then the world. This achieves the equivalent of what can be obtained
by physical or economic force, thanks to the specific effect of mobilization
(Bourdieu 1977b).
Symbolic violence, based on the recognition-misrecognition of external
and interiorized social relations, constitutes the path that allows the repro-
duction and reinforcement of the constitutive and constituted social rela-
tions of power between classes at the symbolic level. We can observe this
same process in other analytical spheres: when we particularly study each
274  A. B. GUTIÉRREZ

of the socially specific universes, for example, the political field, the artistic,
the religious or the scientific. In this way, we concur with Wacquant when
he points out:

Indeed, the whole of Bourdieu’s work may be interpreted as a materialist

anthropology of the specific contribution that various forms of symbolic
violence make to the reproduction and transformation of structures of dom-
ination. (Wacquant 1992: 14–15)

In these universes where symbolic capital is at stake, Bourdieu identifies

a group of general properties they all share. First of all, the practices
involved are symbolic exchanges. They always have a “double truth,” a
sort of contradiction between subjective truth and objective reality which
is possible because of a kind of self-deception and sustained self-­
mystification; not because of hypocrisy, but because of collective self-­
deception (and collective misrecognition) (Bourdieu 2000). Another
property that characterizes them is the “the taboo of making things explicit
(whose form par excellence is the price)” (Bourdieu 2000: 96): we could
say that, as “price” works as a kind of consensus over change rates during
economic exchanges, each economy of symbolic exchanges also has its
own “price.” But the terms and conditions remain in an implicit state. A
kind of “everything occurs as if …” (Bourdieu 2000: 96) and “silence
about the truth of the exchange is a shared silence” (ivi: 97). In addition,
through a kind of “symbolic alchemy” (ivi: 99), these economies allow a
transfiguration of domination and exploitation into affective and power
relations, into charisma or “charm.” All of this is possible (including exer-
cising symbolic violence) because it is collective and is based on the
involved agents’ orchestration of dispositions and on the “miraculous
encounter” among the habitus and objective structures where they func-
tion. Finally, because the economy(ies) of symbolic goods are based on
belief, it is necessary to recognize that its reproduction or its crisis depend
on the reproduction of beliefs or its specific crisis. That is to say the “con-
tinuity or rupture with the adjustment between mental structures (catego-
ries of perception and appreciation, systems of preference) and objective
structures” (ivi: 122).
 12  MARX AND BOURDIEU: FROM THE ECONOMY TO THE ECONOMIES  275

The Field as a Space for the Game

Each of the social universes, with their own economy, capitals at stake,
interest and bets, constitute fields. Bourdieu defines these as:

historically constituted areas of activity with their specific institutions and

their own laws of functioning. The existence of a specialized and relatively
autonomous field is correlative with the existence of specific stakes and
interest. (Bourdieu 1990e: 87)

It is the preoccupation with thinking about those social universes with

an economy irreducible to economic interest, that brings Bourdieu to pro-
pose his concept of field. Indeed, with this notion Bourdieu distances him-
self both from the formalism that offers total autonomy to areas of
production of meaning, and the reductionism that directly relates artistic
forms to social forms. Formalism assumes explanations that resort to anal-
ysis of the internal evolution of ideas—or artistic forms—in themselves: a
kind of “pure” universe far removed from the social world that produces
them. Reductionism, on the other hand, adheres to explanations that—
without further analysis—identify an aesthetic production with the pro-
ducer’s (or consumer’s) social class, thus making “the short-circuit
mistake” (Bourdieu 1987: 113). These views have something in common:
both ignore the fact that artistic practices are inserted into a specific social
universe, an autonomous field of production (with its own nómos), defined
by its objective relationships.
Thus, as early as 1966 and inspired by Max Weber’s sociology of reli-
gions, Bourdieu proposed a first formulation of the intellectual field as a
relatively autonomous universe (Bourdieu 1966). And also on this occa-
sion he expresses his debt not only to Weber, but also to the Marxist
perspective:

It isn’t out of any love of paradox that I would say that Weber carried out
the Marxist intention (in the best sense of the term) in areas where Marx
had not managed to do so. I’m thinking in particular of religious sociology,
which is far from being Marx’s forte. Weber built up a veritable political
economy of religion; more precisely, he brought out the full potential of the
materialist analysis of religion without destroying the properly symbolic
character of the phenomenon. (Bourdieu 1990d: 36)
276  A. B. GUTIÉRREZ

In a text dedicated to the study of the State (Bourdieu 1998) and mark-
ing the “decisive contribution” of Weberian sociology of religion for the
formulation of the theory of symbolic systems, Bourdieu points out that:

Indeed, if he shares with Marx an interest in the function—rather than the

structure—of symbolic systems, Weber nonetheless has the merit of calling
attention to the producers of these particular products (religious agents, in
the case that concerns him) and to their interactions (conflict, competition,
etc.). In opposition to the Marxists, who have overlooked the existence of
specialized agents of production (…) Weber reminds us that, to understand
religion, it does not suffice to study symbolic forms of the religious type, as
Cassirer or Durkheim did, or even the immanent structure of the religious
message or of the mythological corpus, as with the structuralists. Weber
focuses specifically on the producers of the religious message, on the specific
interests that move them and on the strategies they use in their struggle.
(Bourdieu 1998: 57)

Building his notion of the (religious) field, Bourdieu draws on Weber’s

analysis of the strategies and interactions between priests, prophets and
magicians in ancient Christianity (Bourdieu 1971, 1991). And, by defin-
ing it as a structure of objective relationships that underpin practices and
representations, he moves from the interactions of Weberian analysis to
structural relationships (that is, “both against Weber and with Weber”—
Bourdieu 1990d: 49). In this sense, Baranger (2004) suggests that
Bourdieu’s field theory can be presented as a continuation of the Weberian
project, but only on the condition of bringing into play the idea of the
field as an objective network or configuration between positions, which
recalls the Marxian idea of relations as independent from individual con-
sciences and wills. Furthermore, it is Bourdieu himself who recognizes the
need to intertwine Weber with Marx:

my reading of Max Weber—who, far from opposing Marx, as is generally

thought, with a spiritualist theory of history, in fact carries the materialist
mode of thought into areas which Marxist materialism effectively abandons
to spiritualism—helped me greatly in arriving at this kind of generalized
materialism; this will be a paradox only to those who have an over-simple
view of Weber’s thought, owing to the combined effect of the rarity of
translations, the one-sidedness of the early French and American interpreta-
tions, and the perfunctory anathemas pronounced by ‘Marxist’ orthodoxy.
(Bourdieu 1990b: 17)
 12  MARX AND BOURDIEU: FROM THE ECONOMY TO THE ECONOMIES  277

Following the same lines about the relationship between Marx and
Weber in a Bourdieusian perspective, Brubaker (1985) points out that
Bourdieu has been concerned with completing Marx’s programme, inte-
grating Durkheimian contributions on the sociology of symbolic forms,
together with Weber’s conceptual tools on practices and other symbolic
dimensions of material life. Swartz (1996), meanwhile, positively values
the attempt to find an intermediate way between the classical opposition
of idealism and materialism, offering Bourdieu’s as a materialist explana-
tion, although without being reductionist about cultural life.

Final Reflection: A Toolbox

Offering a brief final reflection, I return to Bourdieu’s early text concerned
with the central intention of his concept of economy of practice:

Thus the theory of strictly economic practice is simply a particular case of a

general theory of the economics of practice. The only way to escape from
the ethnocentric naiveties of economism, without falling into populist exal-
tation of the generous naivety of earlier forms of society, is to carry out in
full what economism does only partially, and to extend economic calculation
to all the goods, material and symbolic, without distinction, that present
themselves as rare and worthy of being sought after in a particular social
formation—which may be “fair words” or smiles, handshakes or shrugs,
compliments or attention, challenges or insults, honour or honours, powers
or pleasures, gossip or scientific information, distinction or distinctions, etc.
Economic calculation has hitherto managed to appropriate the territory
objectively surrendered to the remorseless logic of what Marx calls “naked
self-interest” only by setting aside a “sacred” island miraculously spared by
the “icy water of egoistical calculation” and left as a sanctuary for the price-
less or worthless things it cannot assess. (Bourdieu 1977a: 177–178)

He extends the economic logic to all goods, material and non-material

and with it, to all the domains of practices. This leads us to argue that the
work of Pierre Bourdieu goes from the “economy” to the “economies.”
And this step is possible because, as the author recognizes, his strong
Marxist mark adds to the contribution of other sources of inspiration. In
this regard, Corcuff points out that “social criticism oriented in a post-­
Marxist sense” (2009: 9) is one of Bourdieu’s most important contribu-
tions. This means putting aside the conspiracy schema, assuming “the
challenge of complexity” (2009: 12) and thinking rather, as we have
278  A. B. GUTIÉRREZ

mentioned above, in terms of ontological complicity and orchestration

without an orchestral conductor. In other words, this social critique aban-
dons the notion of “system” and takes up the challenge as to the existence
of a plurality of relatively autonomous social fields; that is to say, a plurality
of forms of domination, each one with their own and specific mechanisms
of “capitalization of resources” (2009: 15).
In other words, the same set of analytical categories allows us to explain
and understand the different areas of social reality and enables us to scien-
tifically and methodically conceptualize diverse problems. Putting this set
into operation in the construction of a sociology of the various economies
allows us to break with the naïve glance. For example, with a certain com-
mon vision of art and literature as a “creative project,” as an expression of
pure freedom, or with the methodological attitude that erroneously and
directly—without mediation—relates artistic and literary works with the
producer’s position in the social class. This also reminds us that the appar-
ently purer, more sublime things, less subject to the social world, such as
art, science, religion, even politics, are not different from other social and
sociological objects. Their “purification,” “sublimation,” and “removal”
from the everyday world are the result of the specific social relationships
that constitute the specific market where they are produced, distributed,
consumed, and where the belief around their value is generated.
Being able to explain and understand all these phenomena also implies
remembering the importance of the construction of the research object in
this analytical proposal, and the need “to treat theory as a modus ope-
randi” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 161). In other words, this is pos-
sible on the condition of considering the Bourdieusian economy of
practices as “a conceptual toolbox,” in the same sense as Alonso, Martín
Criado, and Moreno Pestaña: “that it needs to be constantly mounted and
traced, activated and readjusted, arranged and discussed so that it does not
lose the ability to explain and understand the concrete social [experience]”7
(2004: 38).
Undoubtedly, this is the greatest challenge to those of us who do
research from the Bourdieusian perspective: to introduce these analytical
tools into our own theoretical-methodological debates and to put them
into operation in our own specific problems.

7
 Translated from the original Spanish by the author.
 12  MARX AND BOURDIEU: FROM THE ECONOMY TO THE ECONOMIES  279

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 PART III

Intellectual Field: Interpreting

Critique of Ideology
 CHAPTER 13

Bourdieu, Marxism and Law: Between

Radical Criticism and Political Responsibility

Gianvito Brindisi

While Marx’s influence on Bourdieu is well-known, an analysis of how

they relate to one another with regard to law requires that we confront a
whole array of problems. These include Bourdieu’s interpretative violence;
the absence of a theory of law in both thinkers and the diversity of their
objects of analysis; the multiplicity of perspectives on law found in Marx
and in those reflections which take him as a starting point; and the dis-
tance between Bourdieu and Marx regarding what is usually defined as the
politics of law. Added to these is the fact that Bourdieu delved into law
after the important period of Marxist-inflected legal studies in the 1960s
and 1970s, without ever himself really engaging with Marx, and instead
made clear his intention to distance himself from Marxism—as illustrated
by the opening part of his most significant article on this theme, in which
he took a stance against Althusser and, in lesser measure, Thompson

I’m grateful to Bridget Fowler for reading this paper and for her valuable suggestions.

G. Brindisi (*)
University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Caserta, Italy
e-mail: Gianvito.Brindisi@unicampania.it

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 285

Switzerland AG 2022
G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and
Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_13
286  G. BRINDISI

(Bourdieu 1987: 814–815).1 Yet it is surely no distortion to maintain that

Bourdieu’s theory did not entirely break away from the Marxian problem-
atic horizon, and that it can be understood as a Marxist-oriented theory
that addresses the symbolic dimension of law.
As is well known, for Marx, law finds both its conditions of possibility
and its function in society, since each form of production generates its own
juridical relations and each political authority does no more than translate
into law a determinate state of the relations of production (Marx
1986–1987: 26). In this sense, law is but a system of representation that
expresses the interests of the ruling class, although it disguises these inter-
ests by idealizing them. These key theses of Marxian discourse on law can,
undeniably, easily be found in Bourdieu: after all, the sociologist: (1)
accuses the producers of juridical discourse of exchanging the logic of
things for the things of logic (Bourdieu 1992: 49); (2) denounces the illu-
sions of a law autonomous from the social, and of an abstract subject of
law (Bourdieu 1987: 814); (3) speaks of the symbolic force of law as a
function of practical denial of the content of action (Bourdieu 1992: 126);
(4) attributes to law the quality of apparent universality, as well as the
function of dissimulating conflict and the interests of the dominant. Hence
the symbolic effectiveness of the juridical work of rationalization resides in
its attribution of universal value to a viewpoint belonging to a specific
region of social space, thus entailing its practical universalization, such that
subjects imagine themselves to be free and do not perceive their own sub-
jection (Bourdieu 1987: 844; 1990a: 84–86).
Yet, at the same time, Bourdieu criticizes any conception of law as a
false representation or false consciousness—that is, as a mere reflection of
the material and a mere instrument of domination. Moreover—and this is
particularly significant—notions of capital in the Marxian sense, of modes
and relations of production, or of exploitation, never appear in Bourdieu’s
texts on law. Moreover, Bourdieu does not deal specifically with the rela-
tionship between the form of modern law and capitalism. Finally, he never
captures the specific moments in which Marx also attributes a performa-
tive value to law and its hegemonic impact on society (De Fiores 2019).

1
 Bourdieu was familiar with Marxist studies in the juridical field thanks to S.  Spitzer
(1983). My analysis will not consider the specificities of Bourdieusian sociology outside of its
relationship with Marx or Marxism, nor the Marxist authors who concerned themselves with
law but whom Bourdieu does not discuss (e.g. Gramsci, Pashukanis, Poulantzas).
 13  BOURDIEU, MARXISM AND LAW: BETWEEN RADICAL CRITICISM…  287

Since it is impossible to conduct an exhaustive comparison of a relation-

ship that is, moreover, fraught with interpretative difficulties, I will use an
exemplary case of misinterpretation to highlight some of their points of
convergence and opposition. Namely, the question of obedience to the
law (understood as sovereign command) and to customary law, central to
the legal debate of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marx was
formed by this debate and elaborated his early thinking in response to it
(Marx 1975).
Yet, here I am not referring to the young Marx, but to the Marx of the
Ethnological Notebooks, as misinterpreted by Bourdieu. In a conversation
with Tetsuji Yamamoto reproduced in one of the appendices to the French
edition of Practical Reason—unfortunately not reprinted in the English
translation—the sociologist, not without a certain gratification, judges it
“worth noting that Marx came close to the concept of habitus while study-
ing customary law” (Bourdieu 1994: 171). He thus recalls a textual refer-
ence where Marx expounded a notion of obedience to customary law as
instinctive and unconscious, on a par with the movements of the body:
“Customary law … is not obeyed, as enacted law is obeyed. When it
obtains over small areas and in small natural groups, the penal sanctions on
which it depends are partly opinion, partly superstition, but to a far greater
extent an instinct almost as blind and unconscious as that which produces
some of the movements of our bodies” (Bourdieu 1994: 171).
However, one small detail renders this representation of Marx as com-
ing close to the concept of habitus rather problematic. For the passage to
which Bourdieu refers does not, in fact, belong to Marx; rather, it is a
quotation from Sumner Maine’s Lectures on the Early History of Institutions
(Maine 1875: 392) which Marx does not even comment upon (Marx
1974: 335).
Bourdieu thus mistakes Maine’s conception of obedience for a com-
ment of Marx’s. Yet on this very point, Marx held that obedience to cus-
tomary law is not instinctual at all, but merely the product of economic
determination. This can be understood by reading a note that Marx dedi-
cates to another passage by Maine, in which the jurist attacks the Austinian-­
derived concept of the sovereign—understood as a social superior endowed
with an effective force of command—on account of its liability to degener-
ate into arbitrary decision. This conception, according to Maine, is incom-
patible with the facts, because the “actual direction of the forces of society
by its sovereign” is limited by a “vast mass of influences, which we call for
shortness moral”—that is, by the aggregate opinions, sentiments,
288  G. BRINDISI

customary practices and beliefs produced by institutions or proper to

human nature itself (Marx 1974: 329). In this respect, Marx thinks not
only that the Austinian conception of law is infantile, but that Maine’s
conception is ideological and conservative: Maine passes off as moral a set
of influences that are primarily economic. If these latter do have a moral
mode of existence, it is always a secondary, derivative mode, and never a
primary one. But above all, Marx argues, Maine disregards the most
important fact, namely, the fact that the supreme existence of the state is
only apparent and that it is, in all its forms, an excrescence of society, des-
tined to disappear when society reaches a new stage of development (Marx
1974: 329).
All this is perfectly consistent with what Marx had already observed
when he criticized the “illusion that law is based on will […] divorced
from its real basis—on free will” (Marx and Engels 1976: 90), and when
he argued that “Legislation, whether political or civil, never does more
than proclaim, express in words, the will of economic relations” (Marx
1976: 147).
Now, it being understood that Bourdieu, unlike Maine, denied that
customary law is something natural and non-arbitrary—non-­politicizable—
his misinterpretation of Marx is revealing not so much because of the
sociologist’s evident interest in fitting himself within what he presumes to
be Marxian thought on habitus. Rather, this is above all telling because
Bourdieu intends to direct an implicit additional criticism against this
thought—that is, it has not understood that the role of habitus in obedi-
ence to law has to be extended beyond customary law, even to highly dif-
ferentiated societies endowed with juridical codes.
Of course, for Bourdieu state law and customary law are not equiva-
lents. Although both are constructed by acts of classification—some small
or even infinitesimal—they are not constructed in the same way.2 But they
are nevertheless observed, because they impose the categories and cogni-
tive structures with which they are thought (Bourdieu 2014: 168).
Obedience is, in this sense, an act of practical belief.
On this point, Bourdieu could have found a terrain of engagement not
so much with the late Marx, but rather with the young Marx, who clearly
thematizes the relationship between instinct and customary law in order
to politicize juridical technicism and to lay the foundations for the

2
 Bourdieu (1987: 849): “the movement from statistical regularity to legal rule represents
a true social modification.”
 13  BOURDIEU, MARXISM AND LAW: BETWEEN RADICAL CRITICISM…  289

universality of the law of the popular classes (Xifaras 2002). But this is not
Bourdieu’s own perspective.
To hypothesize an analysis that Bourdieu could have made, if he had
read the Ethnological Notebooks correctly, it can be said that for the soci-
ologist, the moral moments which Maine conceived as natural and spon-
taneous are not a form of ideological representation that conceals an
economic determination, but rather a form of practical knowledge derived
from the incorporation of the social structure, functional to allowing its
reproduction or transformation.
On this level, we can understand the distance that Bourdieu establishes
between his own perspective and Marx’s.
According to Bourdieu, it is not possible to distinguish between the
world and its representation (Bourdieu 2018: 77), for a vision of the world
has its own materiality that is fully part of effective reality. The political
effectiveness of a symbolic system like the (state or customary) legal sys-
tem lies precisely in it being an instrument of knowledge and not a mere
reflection of the materiality of existence. Indeed, law, like any order,
becomes effective through the subjective dispositions which are prepared
in advance to recognize it practically (Bourdieu 1996: 455, n. 30). For
this reason, law is for Bourdieu the form par excellence of symbolic vio-
lence, exactly insofar as it is able to impose “universal principles that
direct … vision and the action and the representation that it entails”
(Bourdieu 2018: 75).
The conditions for the effectiveness of law reside in a form of symbolic
violence, which does not belong to the field of ideas and does not act by
way of ideology, but rather results from the fact that “agents apply to the
objective structures of the social world structures of perception and appre-
ciation that have emerged from these objective structures and tend there-
fore to see the world and self-evident” (Bourdieu 1990a: 135).
This is not to say that law is not interwoven with social struggles. If
Marx holds that law is determined by the relations of production, and
that, in its correspondence with the interests of the ruling class, it always
records a certain state of the class struggle, for Bourdieu it is the social
structure and the complex set of struggles for classification in the field of
power that determine the contents of law. For Bourdieu, the impact of
social struggle on the construction of reality cannot be reduced to class
struggle alone, but to a multiplicity of struggles between agents who
aspire to impose a representation of the world that conforms to their own
respective interests (Bourdieu 2016: 798).
290  G. BRINDISI

Bourdieu certainly does maintain, together with Marx, that the way in
which men objectify their existence through a specific mode of production
determines their being.3 However, he holds that the objectification of
existence relates not just to the sphere of production, but also to the
struggles and relations of domination between groups within a social space
who compete for the objective representation of the social world. These
relations constitute an order that proves effective because, in passing by
way of subjects’ habitus, it is simultaneously both recognized and misrec-
ognized. In the relationship between legal concepts and their material
habitat (Marx and Engels 1976: 31) therefore, it is necessary to give space
to agents’ habitus, which depends on the position they occupy in the
objective structure of social space and on their properties. The habitat
does not mechanically determine the agents but does influence their
frameworks of perception (Croce 2015). The understanding of law must
overcome a purely objectivist or subjectivist view.
More specifically, the juridical field is a space structured by the relations
of force engaged between the agents within it, on the basis of the unequal
resources at their disposal. This inequality owes to the diversity of their
positions and their respective capitals, which are often homologous to
other positions and capitals in other social fields. The juridical field is thus
an unstable system, susceptible to transformations which derive from the
internal relations among the agents in the field and the relations with
other fields in the more general field of power.
Given these presuppositions, if we are to understand a symbolic system
like the legal system it is necessary to study the agents who produce it,
“how they are influenced, what interests they have, what is their space of
competition, how they struggle among themselves” (Bourdieu 2014:
174).4 Jurists are not simply those whom the division of labour tasks with
keeping up the worship of concepts, locating therein the foundation of the
real relations (Marx and Engels 1976: 29 and 92–93)—that is, they are
not mere ideologists. Rather, they themselves constitute the consensus on
the meaning of the world, and Bourdieu often reminds that Engels’s letter

3
 Marx and Engels (1976: 31–32): “As individuals express their life, so they are. What they
are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how
they produce.”
4
 As has been observed, on this point Bourdieu stands very close to the work of historians
such as Robert W. Gordon. See Coombe (1989).
 13  BOURDIEU, MARXISM AND LAW: BETWEEN RADICAL CRITICISM…  291

to Conrad Schmidt of October 27, 1890, is an exception in this regard

(Bourdieu 2000: 177).
It can be understood, from this, in place of the Marxian thesis that
frames modern law as a social or superstructural form of the capitalist rela-
tions of production, Bourdieu substitutes a conception of modern law as
a product of a cultural revolution, of a new distribution of cultural capital
and its symbolic value in the space of struggles for legitimate classification
(Bourdieu 1996: 371–389). In his reading, these are struggles that have
determined specific forms of habitus and a juridical perception of the
world that is irreducible to relations of production.

Bourdieu Between Althusser and Thompson

As we anticipated at the outset of this chapter, Bourdieu argues these the-
ses are not so much with a view to differentiating himself from Marx—
with whom he never really engages with regard to law—but rather to
differentiate himself from Althusser and, to a lesser degree, from
Thompson. These latter represented two competitors in the intellectual
field from whom he sought to distance himself methodologically.
When Bourdieu criticizes Marx for supposedly not allowing us to think
of law and the state as capable of establishing themselves in minds and
constituting a consensus on the meaning of the world, Bourdieu’s real
polemical target is not Marx but Althusser. For as is well known, the thesis
regarding the state as “this institution that has the extraordinary power of
producing a socially ordered world without necessarily giving orders,
without exerting a constant coercion”—that is, without putting a police-
man behind every individual (Bourdieu 2014: 166)—is essentially the
redefinition of Althusser’s famous thesis on the function of the ideological
state apparatuses (Althusser 2014: 67).
Bourdieu shares with Althusser the thesis that the law cannot be char-
acterized solely in terms of repressive violence. For its normal practices are
based precisely on the ideological state apparatuses or on symbolic vio-
lence. These have similar characteristics and functions: they allow law to
function without recourse to force by operating a naturalization of rela-
tions; they allow the everyday functioning of relations of production or
the reproduction of domination; and they are constitutive of subjects and
not repressive.
But before saying anything about law, it is important to understand
that for Bourdieu the polemical confrontation with Althusser has stakes
292  G. BRINDISI

amounting to nothing less than the understanding of power and the pro-
cesses of subjectification. Although it may seem strange to many, I would
argue that Bourdieu seeks to attribute himself a more productive use of
psychoanalysis in the analysis of subjectification processes and the political
and social dimensions of the unconscious.
Ideology and symbolic violence perform a function of recognition and
misrecognition, and play a role of ideological pre-assignment or practical
predisposition with respect to the unconscious. For Althusser, the indi-
vidual is always ideologically pre-assigned to an identity—the unborn
child is a future-subject who must become what he was already before
being born—because the subject is always-already interpellated by ideol-
ogy and his conduct is regulated by the ideological state apparatuses
(Althusser 2014: 187). As for Bourdieu, he sees the individual as always
pre-adapted to “obey” his social position within the structure. Yet while it
is well known that for Althusser this pre-assignment has an important rela-
tionship with the formation of the unconscious in the Freudian sense
(Althusser 2014: 182), it is less well known that an analogous relationship
also pertains to Bourdieu’s pre-adaptation. The symbolic structure of soci-
ety, by inscribing itself in the unconscious, founds the relationship that
Bourdieu defines as one of doxic submission to the established order, in
the sense that subjectivities always structure themselves in relation to the
place they occupy in the network of symbolic exchanges, believing that
they freely decide what has, in fact, been reserved for them by the social
space. It follows that for Bourdieu it is necessary to historicize the sym-
bolic function—that is, the Other as the subject of experience.
Such historicization, however, must be done in such a way as to dem-
onstrate the dynamism of symbolic systems and the possibilities of struc-
tural transformations on the basis of struggles for classification.
For Bourdieu, the social agent is guided by an alienated unconscious
and accepts being the imaginary subject of actions that in reality have as
their subject the structure (Bourdieu 1996: 29), which exercises a primary
normativity on subjectivities in a manner corresponding to the distribu-
tion of capital in the social space. Therefore, the study of mythopoetic
agents, the sociologist insists, cannot be conducted without reference to
structures. However, agents do not merely function as passive supports for
structures—as in the reading which Bourdieu imputes to Althusser—but
engage in their own games within the boundaries of that field.
The concept of field, understood as the articulation of agents and struc-
tures, serves to show the co-extensiveness between subjectivity and the
 13  BOURDIEU, MARXISM AND LAW: BETWEEN RADICAL CRITICISM…  293

social. It was chosen, says Bourdieu, because of its greater perversion com-
pared to the concept of apparatus, as well as compared to Pierre Legendre’s
concept of dogmatic order (Bourdieu and Maître 1994: X–XII; Legendre
1974) and to the Foucauldian concept of network (Bourdieu 1989: 35).
These critiques are particularly significant. For Bourdieu, if the notions of
apparatus and dogmatic order denote a superficial use of psychoanalysis,
the notion of network is guilty of being too broad to be able to explain the
processes of incorporation of power, notably, the production of mental
structures and beliefs (Wacquant 1993: 34; Bourdieu 1989: 35).
The attentive reader will notice that the sociologist considers a “per-
verse” attitude advantageous for himself when he compares himself with
Althusser (and Legendre), but simultaneously considers disadvantageous
for Foucault what is in fact the same attitude. My hypothesis is that
Bourdieu projects onto Foucault the critiques that a psychoanalytical per-
spective could make of his own attempt to understand the formation of
frameworks of perception and evaluation, which fall short in terms of
explaining psychic reality. The projection, in a psychoanalytic sense, onto
Foucault, and the accusation levelled against Althusser and Legendre,
were functional to Bourdieu’s move to credit himself with a serious use of
psychoanalysis—a work that he had, moreover, only just begun
(Brindisi 2018).
Having shed light on what is at stake, here, we can better understand
Bourdieu’s critique of Althusserian instrumentalism with regard to law.
For the sociologist—unlike for Althusser—it is reductive to explain law as
an instrument of a ruling class (Bidet 2014: XXII–XXIII). To Bourdieu,
the logic of the apparatus appears overly generalizing and essentializing
(Bourdieu 1987: 818; 1990b: 88), because it does not allow us to grasp
the history beyond the structures—that is, the degree of indeterminacy of
agents’ strategies and the plurality of subjectification processes within a
field—nor the way in which the subject, even though acted upon, never-
theless transforms the structure by constructing social reality through
conflict.
Bourdieu thus accuses Althusser of not thinking about the historical
conditions that allowed the juridical field to be constituted as an autono-
mous field, relatively independent of external constraints (Bourdieu 1987:
815). That is, he accuses him of not understanding the constitution of the
juridical universe on the basis of the struggles for classification that take
place within the field of power. Bourdieu’s thesis is that in periods of equi-
librium—that is, when the habitus of juridical agents is spontaneously
294  G. BRINDISI

orchestrated by a hierarchical disciplinary framework—the juridical field

tends “to operate like an ‘apparatus’” (Bourdieu 1987: 818), but that not
even in an apparatus such as total institutions can every action be thought
of as mere execution (Bourdieu 1990b: 88). In any case, the unanimity of
the body of jurists breaks down when the modes of the reproduction of
the dominant positions in society are redefined, as in the case of an eco-
nomic crisis. In these moments of internal struggle within the juridical
field, there becomes evident the removed foundation that had previously
kept the body united, namely “the nonaggression pact that links the mag-
istracy to dominant power” (Bourdieu 1987: 843). Thus, other norms of
functioning for this field can be established.
This critique entails a different understanding of law: unlike the notion
of apparatus, the notion of field allows a better recognition not only of the
phenomena of obedience in their relation to the normativity of the social
structure, but also of the strategies of reproduction and transformation of
the juridical field with respect to the field of power. It moreover has the
advantage of explaining in a more refined way the subjectification pro-
cesses that take place in a practical space of struggles and regularities, on
the basis of the different types of capital which happen to be possessed.
In conclusion, unlike Althusser, Bourdieu believes that the juridical
field, insofar as it is both a relatively autonomous field and a field of strug-
gle, can be critically engaged with and even subverted. Consequently, to
modify the uses of law at the infinitesimal level is also to act on the rela-
tions of domination of which law is the medium.
It is precisely on this point that Bourdieu had strong similarities with
E.P.  Thompson, starting with their common concern to avoid making
social agents into passive supports for structures.
As is well known, Thompson’s culturalist Marxism was strongly critical
of what he considered to be Marx’s main silence, namely human experi-
ence understood as a class’s “affective and moral consciousness”
(Thompson 1978: 174), dependent on historical processes, social strug-
gles and customs. This consciousness extends beyond structures and is the
basis of the transformations within them; properly taking it into account
would render useless any notion of creating a socialist society on the basis
of an Althusserian Science of Marxism.
Individuals are certainly not “free individuals” but “persons experienc-
ing their determinate productive situations and relationships, as needs and
interests and as antagonisms,” who re-appropriate this experience “within
their consciousness and their culture” (Thompson 1978: 164) and act on
 13  BOURDIEU, MARXISM AND LAW: BETWEEN RADICAL CRITICISM…  295

their determinate situation. This is how “structure is transmuted into pro-

cess, and the subject re-enters into history” (Thompson 1978: 170).
Certainly “‘Experience’ (we have found) has, in the last instance, been
generated in ‘material life’, has been structured in class ways, and hence
‘social being’ has determined ‘social consciousness’.” But if “La Structure
still dominates experience,” nevertheless “her determinate influence is
weak. For any living generation, in any ‘now’, the ways in which they
‘handle’ experience defies prediction and escapes from any narrow defini-
tion of determination” (Thompson 1978: 171).
Thompson thus contrasts Althusser’s “idealist delirium,” as he called it,
with the concreteness of Bourdieusian analyses of inertia and the creative
capacity of habitus, believing that French Marxists should re-educate
themselves by drawing on Bourdieu (Thompson 1978: 174). Since expe-
rience is structured according to class modalities, values—the English his-
torian maintains—are obviously coloured by ideology but are not reducible
to it. On the contrary, they are constitutive of the “norms, rules, expecta-
tions, & c, learned (and ‘learned’ within feeling) within the ‘habitus’ of
living” (Thompson 1978: 175).
On this point it is interesting to observe that, unlike Bourdieu,
Thompson read the Ethnological Notebooks correctly, and criticized Marx
precisely because, even though he had the opportunity to engage with a
field of anthropological investigation irreducible to the categories of polit-
ical economy (affectively invested positive norms, customary law, kinship
relations, rules, etc.), he did nothing more than forcibly reduce it to the
framework of economic thought. It was Marx who failed to understand
that the moral influences of which Maine spoke—precisely as specific
modes of existence—ought to be analysed in relation to the plane of affec-
tive consciousness experienced within the context of social struggles, and
not reduced to the economic sphere alone (Thompson 1978: 172).
Thompson vehemently renewed this same accusation, now levelling it
against Althusser, as he argued that the French philosopher had subjected
this field of investigation to an ideological policing operation, while instead
it was necessary to use historical studies to valorize lived experience and
the way it is politically constructed. Thompson does not think, as Maine
does, that these norms are natural, but that they can be historically
reworked and re-appropriated.
Seeking to valorize lived thought—that is, how men experience domi-
nant social norms and how they act upon them—Thompson then refers
back to his own Whigs and Hunters to show that the universe of juridical
296  G. BRINDISI

signs is constitutive of any human practice and that juridical phenomena

are intertwined with economic ones (Thompson 1976: 137). As against
Althusser, Thompson holds that relations of production acquire meaning,
validity and efficacy only in the terms of their juridical definitions.
Bourdieu shares this framework, but, unfortunately, this is not the level
on which he engages with Thompson, whom he accuses of not under-
standing the social universe of law as a relatively autonomous field
(Bourdieu 1987: 815). But beyond this accusation, other theses of his do
seem directly related to Thompson’s thinking, concerning the theatrical-
ization of the official, the ideology and the neutrality of law.
In Whigs and Hunters, the English historian argued that the ideological
effectiveness of the norms, procedures and values that legitimize class
power lies in their being (at least sometimes)—and in any case appear-
ing—substantially just (Thompson 1975: 262–263). It is reductive to
characterize “the rhetoric and the rules of a society” as fictitious, as “in the
same moment they may modify, in profound ways, the behaviour of the
powerful, and mystify the powerless” (Thompson 1975: 265). Law con-
solidates class relations and offers them legitimacy, but it also has an “inde-
pendent history and logic of evolution,” inspired by “logical criteria” and
“standards of universality and equity” (Thompson 1975: 262). It is true
that the reality of law does not correspond to the rhetoric of justice,
although not to the extent that it becomes counterproductive for the
dominant. These latter are prisoners of their own rhetoric, and conse-
quently, when the people appropriate the dominant language—in the
terms Thompson describes, the language of the “‘free-born Englishman’
with his inviolable privacy, his habeas corpus, and his equality before the
law” (Thompson 1975: 264)—and create tensions within the social struc-
ture, they are faced with the alternative of imposing themselves by force or
else accepting a modification of the structure of domination. Law, as an
arena for struggle, is not merely an instrument but also a brake on power.
These theses are not so far from those expounded by Bourdieu, for
instance, in his article on jurists as guardians of collective hypocrisy, in
which he argues that even if law is not what it claims to be, that is, some-
thing pure and autonomous, the fact that it is believed (and makes itself
believed) to be so does nonetheless produce real social effects, first of all
on those who practise law (Bourdieu 1991). Nor are they far from the
thesis which maintains that the “rhetoric of autonomy, neutrality, and uni-
versality,” “far from being a simple ideological mask,” can be “the basis of
a real autonomy of thought and practice” (Bourdieu 1987: 820). Or,
 13  BOURDIEU, MARXISM AND LAW: BETWEEN RADICAL CRITICISM…  297

indeed, from the thesis that “the representations that constitute what
might be termed ‘the law as it is lived’ owe a great deal to the more or less
distorted effect of codified law,” and the officialization effect of law “makes
it possible to speak about, think about, and admit conduct which has pre-
viously been tabooed” (Bourdieu 1987: 846).
Bourdieu will provide an anthropological foundation for these reflec-
tions, basing them on the argument that every group rewards those who
pay homage to it; that interest in the universal is the motor force behind
the advancement of the universal; and that the claim to the universal
involves an at least apparent submission to it (Bourdieu 1996: 388–389;
1998b: 59–60). It is worth remembering that although these theses would
be the origin of the accusation that Bourdieu distanced himself from Marx
in the 1990s, they were also developed in relation to Thompson. With the
difference that, while Thompson carefully separates the sphere of value
from that of interest, in Bourdieu an ambiguous relationship with utilitari-
anism persists.

State, Social Law and Neoliberalism

Starting in the late 1980s, in parallel with the crisis of the welfare state and
its agents, Bourdieu moved away from Marxism, instead turning his com-
mitment as a scholar and an engagé intellectual to a re-evaluation of the
universal and public service. Some have observed that this change of
course represents a step back from his critical sociology (Fabiani 2016:
217), or in any case a strongly aporetic position (Supiot 2017: 75), but
this is not entirely certain.
Bourdieu was perfectly well-aware, along with Corrigan and Sayer, that
historically welfare has not just been an institution of service but also an
institution for controlling and integrating the dominated (Bourdieu 2014:
142), not free from important forms of domination and exclusion. But as
against a capitalism turning back to the violence of its origins (Bourdieu
1998a: 85)—that is, as against the conservative neoliberal revolution and
the weakening of juridical controls on the market—Bourdieu took a stand
in favour of welfare, indeed of a European welfare relatively autonomous
from international economic forces and national-level political forces. He
emphasized the role the social sciences and jurists had played in the con-
struction of welfare (Bourdieu 2014: 364), labour law and social rights as
realized in the French state, whose strength he contrasted with England’s
Thatcherization and the weakness of common law.
298  G. BRINDISI

So, alongside the study of the state and state nobility, Bourdieu makes
the case for a realpolitik of reason in order to defend the universes capable,
in a Durkheimian way, “of practically imposing the norms of ethical and
cognitive universality and really obtaining the sublimated behaviours cor-
responding to the logical and moral ideal” (Bourdieu 2000: 123). The
advent of such universes is realized historically on the basis of an interest
in the universal which is “inseparable from the progressive autonomiza-
tion of social microcosms based on privilege” (Bourdieu 2000: 77). This
is true of agents in the scientific field but also of jurists, who have made the
state by making themselves, that is, having an interest in disinterestedness
on account of the specific logic that regulates their field. This genetic cor-
ruption does not invalidate its universality (Bourdieu 2014: 160).
Undeniably, with this valorization of the juridical field and of the state
as sites for the construction of the universal, Bourdieu distances himself
from Marx, for whom the state and law are not really the site of emancipa-
tion. Bourdieu, moreover, gives no credence to the utopian dimension of
overcoming the heteronomy of political command, that is, the withering
away of law and the state (Marx 1976: 212; Marx and Engels 2017), and
does not recognize any subject (plebs or proletariat) as the bearer of the
universal. Consequently, for Bourdieu, it is not even a question of con-
quering the state apparatus, or of “[dispossessing the] ‘monopolizers’”
(Bourdieu 2014: 100) and changing the structure of social reproduction
from above. Quite the contrary: the sociologist argues that bureaucracy
and the state are not (only) the site of class oppression, that the holders of
the monopoly of the universal are not (only) those who privately appropri-
ate public resources, insofar as the universal is not appropriated with
impunity, according to an anthropological principle by which the recogni-
tion of the universal is in every society honoured, and favours “the appear-
ance of disinterested dispositions” (Bourdieu 2000: 125).
The accusation Bourdieu levels against Kelsenian formalism and Marxist
instrumentalism in his articles on law, as well as his valorization of welfare
in his work on the state and in his 1990s political writings, might sug-
gest—as indeed it did—a Hegelian bent or Bourdieu’s adherence to the
field of social law. But I think it is possible to advance a different interpre-
tative hypothesis, which keeps distinct the specificity of the sociology of
the juridical field and then Bourdieu’s preferences regarding the forces
acting in that field.
What is often seen as a change in Bourdieu’s perspective seems to me
rather more a change in the emphasis placed on issues that the sociologist
 13  BOURDIEU, MARXISM AND LAW: BETWEEN RADICAL CRITICISM…  299

had already earlier recognized. The reason could be identified in the fact
that the strategic configuration of the juridical field is itself changing rap-
idly, and Bourdieu feared a real anthropological shift due to the imposi-
tion of neoliberalism. Its advance, which Bourdieu and some of his
students or collaborators had begun to study since the 1970s,5 led him to
champion certain elements of the juridical field—labour law, social law,
universality—that he had already identified in The Force of Law, albeit
reserving a marginal space for them, or in the recently published course of
1977–1988 (Bourdieu 2022). If this is indeed the case, then the contra-
diction between his scholarly writings and political writings would be only
very relative.
I will try to show this by analysing the relationship between social law,
social rights and neoliberalism—which Bourdieu often symbolizes through
the metaphor of the right (neoliberal) hand and the left (social) hand of
the state—discussing the positions taken in this regard by Julien Pallotta,
Jean-Louis Fabiani and Christian Laval, who chalk Bourdieu up to
Hegelianism or to the Durkheimian juridical inheritance.
In an interesting article on the relationship between Althusser and
Bourdieu with regard to the state, Pallotta argued that there is no more
radical divergence between the philosopher and the sociologist than there
is over the question of social rights. On the one hand, Althusser has an
anti-Hegelian perspective, for which social rights are a tactical concession
made by the ruling classes aimed at ensuring the reproduction of their
domination, that is, the maintenance of capitalist relations of production;
on the other, Bourdieu conceives the struggles that advance the universal
as integrative struggles, that is, as conquests of rights within the frame-
work of the state, in a compromise position in between the Marxian class
struggle and the Hegelian state (Pallotta 2015).
Fabiani has argued that Bourdieu’s political interventions have nothing
to do with Marxism. As an example of this, he cites the sociologist’s
famous speech at Lyon station, in which he declared that he wanted to
defend a civilization linked to the existence of public service and republi-
can equality of rights, but without his call for mobilization thereby making
any reference to the working class. On this reading, these interventions

5
 Jean-Yves Caro was one of the first economists to deal with neoliberalism in France from
a Bourdieusian perspective. See Caro (1981 and 1983). Yves Dezalay has analysed in numer-
ous works the neoliberal transformations of law. See Dezalay (1992). Among his work with
Brian Garth, see at least Dezalay and Garth (1998, 2021).
300  G. BRINDISI

expressed bitterness at the disappearance of the sociologist’s doxic world,

as represented by public service, and his almost affective proximity to
Durkheim, with whom he was in agreement that the state is the embodi-
ment of the collective. These two theses are not unrelated, for the
Durkheimian sociologist perceives himself as a sociologist of the state, and
sociology was one of welfare’s conditions of possibility (Fabiani 2016:
216–218).
Fabiani’s interpretation was taken up by Laval, who convincingly added
that Bourdieu’s defence of the state is part of a sociological and political
tradition that seeks to defend the state from its enemies—the Church and
capitalism—and to democratize public services. On this reading, there-
fore, Bourdieu’s orientation is comparable to Léon Duguit and his notion
of public service based on solidarity (Laval 2018: 243).6
Although these interpretative choices are each well founded, in my
judgement they do not help to understand the specificity of Bourdieu’s
sociology of the juridical field, nor the fact that his political positions do
not necessarily represent a step backwards from his critical sociology.
I am going to deal simultaneously with both social rights and the
Durkhemian legacy in Bourdieu. But before that, it is important to note
that the question of social law and the question of social rights guaranteed
by state provision do not express the same order of problems, even though
in Bourdieu they do overlap. In fact, while social rights have established
themselves in the same time frame independently of the given legal archi-
tectures and political regimes—and are often conceived as dependent on a
state granting these rights because of class struggles—social law instead
represents a juridical rationality, an (at least outwardly) anti-statist way of
understanding law, which desacralizes the state and intends to achieve a
sociologically based legal revolution in order to impose limits on capital-
ism’s social fallout.
For Bourdieu, social law, as the law of the (some) dominated, has his-
torically affirmed itself through a movement that can be found in every
field. It is through reference to the scientific and political fields that social
law jurists have constructed a critical argument aimed at making law “a
‘science’ possessing its own methodology and rooted in historical reality.”
Through sociology and the analysis of jurisprudence, they have defended
their socio-legal science—against statism and exegesis—as capable of

6
 On the other dimensions of political struggle (redefinition of the macroeconomic calcu-
lus, internationalism, etc.) that Laval recognizes in Bourdieu, see Laval (2018: 243–245).
 13  BOURDIEU, MARXISM AND LAW: BETWEEN RADICAL CRITICISM…  301

adapting “the law to social evolution” (Bourdieu 1987: 851–852). But

Bourdieu, attached to the positions of Alain Bancaud and Yves Dezalay,7
with whom he had held the 1986 seminar on law at the Collège de France,
always puts the notion of science in inverted commas when he is speaking
of social law. Indeed, he accuses social law jurists of seeking to preserve the
monopoly of legal science, since they do not break with the mythical rep-
resentation of neutrality which jurists give to their work. In short, even if
Bourdieu acknowledges that social law has been the subversive action car-
ried out by a vanguard, he argues that it contributes to the maintenance of
the symbolic order, since it determines “the adaptation of the law and the
juridical field to new states of social relations, and thereby insure[s] the
legitimation of the established order of such relations” (Bourdieu
1987: 852).
From a certain point of view, this thesis is even more radical than
Althusser’s, which argued that jurisprudence was relative to a “law’s out-
side […] more or less threatening” “from the standpoint of the security of
the law” (Althusser 2014: 58). For Bourdieu, in fact, even the most sub-
versive jurists—for instance, ones who valorize jurisprudence as outside of
the law—perform a legitimizing function for the apparatus of reproduc-
tion of the symbolic domain, which Althusser would have defined as ideo-
logical. After all, even subversive jurists, as a dominated fraction of the
ruling class, try to impose a legitimate functioning of the law by attribut-
ing to themselves a power that they do not currently have, by fighting
against the dominant fraction of the ruling class and through an alliance
with certain fractions of the dominated classes (the middle classes and
popular classes). Bourdieu recognizes a dual character in this strategy of
symbolic subversion: on the one hand, it tends to attribute a dominant
position to itself, and on the other hand it tends to deny itself as such
ideologically. However, by virtue of the logic of the field, the sociologist
acknowledges that social law has been a factor in the progress of the
universal.
It is not Bourdieu’s position that is contradictory, but the object he
analyses: the legal agents who promote social law allow for the conquests

7
 Bourdieu (1987: 844): “Alain Bancaud and Yves Dezalay have demonstrated that even
the most heretical of dissident legal scholars in France, those who associate themselves with
sociological or Marxist methodologies to advance the rights of specialists working in the
most disadvantaged areas of the law (such as social welfare law, droit social),” continue to
claim a monopoly of the science of jurisprudence. See Bancaud and Dezalay (1984).
302  G. BRINDISI

won by the dominated, but at the same time, through their insistence that
law is a science, they also enable the reproduction of the structure of the
juridical field and the belief in the neutrality of law.
The invocation of this neutrality, the ascetic posture of the jurist with
respect to politics, is not so much an explicit strategy of jurists, but a per-
vasive attitude that defines professional legal subjectivities as they have
been structured across the long history of struggles for power. This neu-
trality is not a real neutrality, because it can be and often is conservative
(uncritical valorization of existing power relations). But it can also be the
basis of an anthropological transformation in the direction of disinterest-
edness. Such a position is certainly not Marxian, even if Bourdieu devel-
oped it also in relation to Thompson, as mentioned earlier.
If it is true that social rights impose themselves by virtue of the social
forces underpinning them and the jurists who sanction them, then they
will disappear when those social forces disappear, in the same way that they
first established themselves. Bourdieu is no stranger to this realist approach,
because he holds that even if the juridical field is relatively autonomous, it
is linked and somehow subordinate to historical-political factors. However,
for Bourdieu, social law has nevertheless represented a legal epistemology
clearly superior to the liberal one, as it adheres more closely to the com-
plexity of reality. Thus, Bourdieu does not so much promote an integra-
tive order of the state—understood in the Hegelian sense—but rather
seeks to guarantee the conditions of possibility for the reactivation of a
form of social law, now that the historical-political situation that allowed
for Welfare is under attack. As a result, he does not develop a social epis-
temology to be counterposed to neoliberalism from a normative point of
view, but prefers to maintain close attention to the exercise of symbolic
violence.
All this can be better explained by analysing the relationship between
Bourdieu’s sociology of the juridical field and Durkheimian theories of
social law. In my view, there is no possibility of juxtaposing them, as I will
try to demonstrate.
There are certainly cues in Bourdieu that point in this direction, such as
when the sociologist argues that “the official definition of state office—
and of officials, who are mandated to serve, not serve themselves—is an
extraordinary historical invention, an advance for humanity” (Bourdieu
2008: 197), which does indeed recall Duguit’s thesis that the governing
are the managers of public service (Duguit 1913: 33–70). But in the
quoted passage Bourdieu is valorizing a juridical form that, in its
 13  BOURDIEU, MARXISM AND LAW: BETWEEN RADICAL CRITICISM…  303

constitutive ambiguity, has historically allowed for the advance of the

dominated—a form that is not typically French. With regard to the official
definition of the figures who hold office, Bourdieu also often refers to
Thompson (Bourdieu 2014: 64), for whom the English constitutionalism
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries invented a genuine autonomy
of law that represents a qualitative leap in human societies (Thompson
1975: 259).
In any case, it remains difficult to inscribe Bourdieu in the Durkhemian
tradition of legal studies, such as would render him a sociologist of the
state or a philosopher of public service. It is thus worth turning to his
analysis of social law, to see the way in which he departs from it, and
whether he retains any traits of Marxist orientation.
Bourdieu does not believe that social law is an objective science. He
even goes so far as to accuse those who try to ground law in the social
(such as Eugen Ehrlich) of merely overturning the idealistic scheme of
pure theory (Bourdieu 1987: 841, n. 58),8 which can easily be extended
to the legal objectification of social solidarity. If he nonetheless valorizes
social law, this is because he is clear, as he states in The Force of Law, that it
was a way to break from the outside, through sociology, the monopoly of
legal theory, which in fact tended to perceive social law as intrinsically
linked to socialism.
But this does not allow us to say that Bourdieu takes up a position in
the tradition of social law; if he had, then he would have reactivated it on
his own account. While in his course on the state he valorizes the perfor-
mative work of social law jurists as historical agents who prepared welfare,
he does not even make reference to Duguit or—to stick with jurists of
Durkheimian orientation—Emmanuel Lévy or Georges Davy (Bourdieu
2014: 364).
Because of the importance Bourdieu attached to the methodological
overcoming of the partition between subjectivism and objectivism, he
would have appreciated Duguit’s critical, anti-subjectivist side (Sfez
1976)9 but not his sociological objectivism. The sociologist did not have
an integrative, organicist, objectivist position like Duguit’s, and he argued
theses incompatible with the social declension of law. Bourdieu’s analysis

8
 The quotation in this note belongs to Eugen Ehrlich, but the translator did not indi-
cate this.
9
 For an appreciation of the pars destruens and a critique of the pars construens of Duguit’s
work, see Chevallier (1979).
304  G. BRINDISI

of the juridical field is not aimed at adapting law to life, nor at showing
what law actually exists, nor finally at promoting a social foundation of law
by identifying a social rule according to the function that each figure plays
in the system of social interdependence. Unlike Duguit, for example, for
Bourdieu the legal norm is not the recognition of a social norm based on
solidarity, itself revealed by a widespread social sentiment, whose claims
allow Duguit (rightly so, from his point of view) to deduce a posteriori the
existence of a right.
Unlike Duguit, Bourdieu does not concern himself with the gap
between social normativity, the expression of the solidaristic bond and its
juridical formalization. For the sociologist, social normativity does not
represent a spontaneous and natural order of phenomena, but is the prod-
uct of a social field and of the struggle for the classification of reality that
plays out within this field. To put it bluntly: Bourdieu’s sociology privi-
leges the dimension of struggle over that of solidarity and does not think
about social ties independently of the relations of domination that charac-
terize them. Social normativity is not the nature of things that is to be
transformed into a juridical imperative, but an empirically ascertained
regularity patterned by relations of power. Since for Bourdieu there is no
non-conflictual social bond, or nomos, social normativity and juridical
norms must themselves be critiqued with regard to their formation-­
processes, and problematized starting from the relations of force that
establish them. This stance is much closer to the external history of law of
the young Hauriou (1884)10 than to a Saint-Simonian solidarism like
Duguit’s.
Certainly, Bourdieu considers desirable the formation within the juridi-
cal field of an economic-juridical and social epistemology that is “faithful
to the complexity of reality” (Bourdieu 2008: 194), such as could be con-
trasted with neoliberalism in its normative function and in service of the
state. For the economization of legal rationality undermines the possibility
of a public space in which the fight for emancipation can take place.
Bourdieu states this rather explicitly when he argues that neoliberal tech-
nocracy must be fought on the level of science (Bourdieu 1998a: 27), or

10
 On this point, I have tried to interpret Bourdieu’s and Foucault’s methodological inno-
vations in the juridical field as an extension of the external history of law, in the direction of
a critique of the articulation of legal practices with phenomena of heterogeneous social nor-
mativity (Brindisi 2019). On the relationship between Bourdieu and Foucault see Brindisi
and Irrera (2017), Laval (2018).
 13  BOURDIEU, MARXISM AND LAW: BETWEEN RADICAL CRITICISM…  305

that we must demand of the state that “it exercise a regulatory action able
to counteract the ‘fatality’ of economic and social mechanisms that are
immanent to the social order” (Bourdieu 2008: 194). The conservative
neoliberal revolution, as he defines it, aimed to relegate progressive
thought and action to the sphere of archaism. But it differed from the
other and more famous conservative revolution, that is, the one in the
Weimar Republic, in the role attributed to economic science rather than
the exaltation of blood and soil. Consequently, Bourdieu urges the social
sciences to mobilize, taking this for an effective condition of democracy.
This is the reason why in the 1990s the sociologist took a tactical position
in favour of welfare, with a view to building a supranational welfare state
capable of operating at the transnational level now taken by the new forms
of domination (Bourdieu 1998a: 1–44).
However, if the theoretical direction which Bourdieu wanted the juridi-
cal field to develop in is one thing, the specificity of his sociology of the
juridical field—which remains external and critical—is quite another. An
author such as Alain Supiot could even judge this latter completely useless
from the juridical point of view, arguing that nothing is to be gained from
lamenting the end of welfare without then equipping oneself with a legal
epistemology able to grapple with its institutional dimension (Supiot
2017: 75).
Laval’s and Supiot’s interpretations can be integrated. With respect to
Laval, it can be added that Bourdieu did not belong to the juridical tradi-
tion of Durkheimian origins, although he hoped for its reaffirmation in
the juridical field. With respect to Supiot, it can be added that it is not true
that one should share the sociologist’s indignation but take a distance
from his theory, for the value of Bourdieu’s scientific project resides pre-
cisely in its being external to the juridical field—in its being a critical the-
ory of domination functional to social struggles. This provides grounds to
insist that the externality of Bourdieu’s critique to the juridical field and its
relationship to emancipatory practices retain a Marxian lineage.
Now, from what has been said, one might think that although Bourdieu
does not believe in the scientific autonomy of social law, he does believe in
the relative autonomy of the juridical field with respect to the field of
power. However, can a relatively autonomous space in which a regulated
game takes place be a promoter of universality without being accompanied
by a social force that tends to socially advance the universal?
Moreover, Bourdieu himself argued that it is not enough to fight neo-
liberalism on an exclusively epistemological level. Referring to
306  G. BRINDISI

neomarginalist analyses in economics, he stated that their epistemological

weakness is hidden by their socio-political effectiveness. Therefore “We
cannot then be satisfied with a theoretical criticism that is bound to lose
because it comes up against social forces. We must also try to understand
the social forces that make the strength of very weak theories. When you
work in and on the social world there is no scientific opponent more dif-
ficult than one who is theoretically weak and socially strong” (Bourdieu
2020: 99).

Concluding Remarks on the Marxian Ancestry

of the Sociology of the Juridical Field

Before answering the question I have posed, it is necessary to unravel

some problematic nodes regarding the specificity of Bourdieu’s sociology
of the juridical field. We shall do so by proceeding with a brief discussion
of its insidious relationship with Durkhemian legal sociology, so as to
bring out its Marxian lineage.
If Bourdieu rejects both an idealistic autonomy of law (formalism), and
any reductionist dependence of the juridical upon the economic (instru-
mentalism), it is because the true legislator is the ensemble of social agents
in their struggles and alliances, on the basis of their own determinations
related to the position they occupy in the field. We could therefore con-
sider that law is to be found in these relations, and that a hypothetical
legislator, for example, merely acknowledges a rule that is imposed on
him. But if we did that, we would be led to identify the juridical with the
practical legality proper to a social game and with its immanent necessities,
thus rendering Bourdieu’s sociology a sociology of law tout court, in rela-
tion to the nomos of each field. It would thus be easy to venture to identify
the object of Bourdieusian sociology in the unwritten constitution of soci-
ety that lives in the concrete reality of the social group—that is, in a vision
close to the theories of living law, social law and legal pluralism. However,
Bourdieu would consider (although not always rightly) this reduction of
law to society a mere reversal of the idealistic scheme, as well as an affirma-
tion of naturalism (Bourdieu 1987: 841).
It should be added that Bourdieu does not have an organicist theory of
society, nor does he identify in the state an operative subjective will.
Rather, in both he recognizes a field of struggle. His realist nominalism
induces him to consider law, as well as institutions and customs, as a
 13  BOURDIEU, MARXISM AND LAW: BETWEEN RADICAL CRITICISM…  307

historically instituted and naturalized arbitrary. If there is an objectivity of

law—as there is—this cannot disguise the power relations of which it is an
expression and the principles of classification that constitute it, and nor
can it be considered independently of either. Therefore, constructing an
autonomous science around law—and social law, according to Bourdieu is
no different—is tantamount to freeing it from any political problematiza-
tion of the epistemic background of the dominant social norms that law
reproduces. Yet such a problematization is precisely what Bourdieu sets
out to do with his epistemological model, which is aimed at objectifying
the strategies of agents who use theory or norms according to the position
they take on in the social field, that is, at objectifying the struggle for the
classification of reality.
Bourdieu does not recognize law as a natural order of things (which
would amount to a legal doxa). He sees the juridical field as relatively
autonomous and at the same time as somehow subordinate to historical-­
political factors, since the general rule of the structure of the juridical field
is that the hierarchies within it vary in relation to the changing place, in
the social field, of the groups whose interests are linked to the correspond-
ing forms of law (Bourdieu 1987: 850–851). Thus, in each moment the
law records a given state of the relation of forces—as the history of social
law or the neoliberal recodification of law since the 1970s demonstrate.
Bourdieu’s theory remains analytical and not normative: it does not
aspire to impose itself or to be recognized in order to enter the juridical
field and to be functional to a social or state power. Its scientific function
is a critical analysis of the relationship between the juridical field and the
field of power, and this analysis is itself functional to emancipation. In this
Bourdieu retains a Marxian orientation. For both Marx and Bourdieu, it
can be argued against Durkheim that normative facts are not things, but
social relations already always discriminated by relations of production
or power.
Jacques Commaille reproached Bourdieu precisely because his Marxian
preoccupation with the relationship between law and the ruling classes led
him to underestimate the capacity of social actors and movements outside
the juridical field to mobilize law and redefine it (Commaille 2008). This
accusation is hard to deny, and one that could not be levelled, for instance,
at Thompson, for whom the appropriation of a dominant rule bent to a
new use can change the structure of domination. But at the same time, it
is also an unfair accusation, when we consider that it is precisely an analysis
of the juridical field such as Bourdieu’s that can (from a different point of
308  G. BRINDISI

view) be functional to social consciousness-raising, and that it is not hos-

tile to the mobilization or entry of new actors into the juridical field.
Moreover, Bourdieu argued that law, although subordinate to the field of
power, constitutes a reason endowed with an objectivity that can be actu-
alized by virtue of the memory of past struggles (Bourdieu 2000: 127).
I can now try to answer the question which I posed at the end of the
previous section, reformulating and specifying it: if, realistically, the trans-
formation of the world through new words to name it presupposes that
these words are adequate to what they announce—“new practices, new
mores or especially new social groupings” (Bourdieu 1987: 839)—how is
it possible to think that the juridical field can, by virtue of its mere regula-
tion, guarantee universal access to the universal? If the juridical field is
open to the transformations of the field of power, how can universality be
realized in a monopolized space, without this being accompanied by a
social force that tends to advance the universal socially?
This is where the function of critique comes in. A focus on the relative
autonomy of the juridical field must not obscure the need to question the
value-positions, the order of classifications that jurists impose on the social
world and that the social world imposes on them. The relative autonomy
of law never makes it fully autonomous from the social processes of valo-
rization, from the tendencies immanent in institutions that are the prod-
uct of a social struggle for the classification of reality. Therefore, the
struggle for the universal in the juridical field cannot but correspond—on
pain of losing its status—to an effective universality in the process of affir-
mation, to a tendency towards the immanent universal of practices.
The critique of the field and of juridical classifications is functional to
this end. A field in which the universal is given primacy is the condition of
possibility for a social claim to the universal. But it also needs to be inhab-
ited by a social force that tends towards the universal, which in turn needs
to be animated by a critique capable of unmasking the social classifications
that pass themselves off as universal.
Ultimately, it is in a same text that Bourdieu reaffirms the role of the
state and argues that a socio-economic epistemology of happiness is incon-
ceivable without the invention of “new forms of delegation and represen-
tation,” which must in turn be founded on the critique of symbolic
violence. His sociology of the juridical field is functional to what he recog-
nizes as the “top priority,” namely “raising critical awareness of the mecha-
nisms of symbolic violence that act in and through politics; and this means
broadly distributing the symbolic weapons able to ensure all citizens the
 13  BOURDIEU, MARXISM AND LAW: BETWEEN RADICAL CRITICISM…  309

means of defending themselves against symbolic violence—liberating

themselves, if need be, of their ‘liberators’” (Bourdieu 2008: 195–196).
The critique of the legal field does not intend to propose reforms but to
problematize the practical belief in a certain state of legal and social norms,
in order to encourage a possible transformation on the part of the
dominated.
These elements relating to social struggle and the performative role of
critique in the direction of emancipatory practices represent the reworking
of the Marxian legacy in Bourdieu, whose precise intention is that his cri-
tique should encourage “new practices, new mores or especially new social
groupings.”
It could be argued that Bourdieu’s is an attitude of radical critique and
political responsibility, which are not necessarily contradictory, and of
which the latter does not necessarily represent a step backwards with
respect to the former, if one is willing to accept that, in the awareness of
the actual state of power relations, one can and must maintain a conserva-
tive position (in relation to social rights under attack) in order not to turn
out to be truly conservative (in relation to status quo). At the same time,
the critique of symbolic violence has the task of politically problematizing
law, juridical science and, in general, those scientific classifications that
obstruct democratic processes aimed at creating new institutions and new
forms of real equality. Yet, this was itself the hardest thing to achieve. For
it meant having to reckon with forms of subjectivity which have fallen
under the cognitive and affective influence of neoliberal frames for the
representation and perception of the world; forms which, over the years,
have retreated into a protection of the material and symbolic boundaries
of the nation-state.

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 CHAPTER 14

If Theodicy is Always Sociodicy: Bourdieu

and the Marxian Critique of Religion

Roberto Alciati

Bourdieu’s engagement with religion is profound, even if his own publica-

tions on the subject were not very frequent.1 Nevertheless, here and there
in his vast production it is possible to join the dots of a ‘Bourdieuan theory
of religious practice’ (Maduro 2007: viii), which can be summarized as
such: ‘Bourdieu’s critique of religion is aimed, almost exclusively, at reli-
gion’s function in the creation and consecration of social distinctions and
inequalities, or in the reproduction of social domination’ (Rey 2007: 8).
This becomes clear when looking at his frequent use of religious meta-
phors to speak of almost everything (education, politics, art…). Moreover,
as Erwan Dianteill pointed out, the meaning and the use of some
Bourdieu’s keywords, such as ‘field’ or ‘habitus’, is so indebted to the
study of religion that ‘Bourdieu’s work is almost a “generalized” sociology
of religion (with religion representing in paradigmatic fashion properties

1
 I am grateful to Bridget Fowler and Emiliano R.  Urciuoli for helpful comments on a
previous draft.

R. Alciati (*)
University of Florence, Florence, Italy
e-mail: roberto.alciati@unifi.it

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 313

Switzerland AG 2022
G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and
Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_14
314  R. ALCIATI

common to all spheres of symbolic activity)’ (Dianteill 2004: 66; see also
Swartz 1996). This interest is demonstrated both by the not insignificant
literature on the subject and the growing influence of Bourdieu’s work on
the academic study of religion (Rey 2018; Saalmann 2020: 139–149;
Suaud 2020).
Nonetheless, among Bourdieu’s many concepts which are now widely
circulated in the social sciences, one is decidedly neglected. I refer to the
term ‘sociodicy’ and a quotation from ‘Genèse et structure du champ
religieux’ (1971), which is rightly considered ‘Bourdieu’s most important
and most widely cited direct consideration of religion’ (Rey 2007: 75).
Bourdieu expressed this precisely, in the following terms: ‘theodicies are
always sociodicies’ (Bourdieu 1991: 16). So far—apart from a brief entry in
the Dictionnaire International Bourdieu (Denord 2020)—nobody has
paid proper attention to this statement.
The aim of this contribution is to try to fill this gap. The first step in this
direction will be the analysis of some—but certainly not all—Bourdieusian
loci where theodicy and sociodicy are at stake (§ 1). The second move-
ment will be aimed at showing how this terminological pair becomes
salient only by granting Karl Marx the primacy in the triad that he com-
poses with Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, and which represents
Bourdieu’s constant dialectical reference (§ 2.). Once these two aspects
are foregrounded, religion will appear not just as an essential element in
the definition of the concept of field, but also as an object of permanent
critique, not least because it is the foundation of every critique of society
and its structures (§ 3.).

Theodicy and Sociodicy
Theodicy is a classic term of Christian theology (and its history); sociodicy,
on the other hand, is a Bourdieusian neologism.2 As François Denord puts
it, the concept of sociodicy was coined by Bourdieu by analogy with theo-
dicy, a term that was itself coined by Gottfried Leibniz in a book of the
same name in 1710. As has been argued tellingly by Christopher Adair-
Toteff, the problem of theodicy is ‘the age-old difficulty of attempting to

2
 Actually, as far as I know, the very first attestation of the term is found in an article’s title
published by Daniel Bell (1966). However, the author does not develop the concept further,
taking its meaning for granted. It is therefore difficult to argue that Bell produced the semi-
nal essay on sociodicy that the title seemed to announce (Giner 2014: 292). I am grateful to
Vincenzo Romania for drawing my attention to Bell’s article.
 14  IF THEODICY IS ALWAYS SOCIODICY: BOURDIEU AND THE MARXIAN…  315

reconcile the fact that there is evil and suffering in this world with the idea
of a supremely benevolent and omnipotent God’ (Adair-Toteff 2013: 88).
Leibniz, however, is not Bourdieu’s only point of reference on the sub-
ject. The problem of theodicy, in fact, appears in Bourdieu’s writings in
relation to Max Weber, and more precisely to the ‘Religiöse Gemeinschaften’
section of Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen, in which Weber writes
that the theological problem of theodicy must be considered as an ‘unsolv-
able problem’ (Weber 2001: 296–297). Yet Weber does not tackle this
issue from a theological or ethical point of view, ‘but rather, he appropri-
ates it and discusses it primarily from a sociological perspective’ (Adair-­
Toteff 2013: 89). According to Weber, in fact, ‘the fortunate is seldom
satisfied with the fact of possession of his fortunateness’ (Weber 1989:
89). This person also wanted the ‘right’ to justify their fortune: ‘he also
has the need to have a right to it’ (Weber 1989: 89). In other words, ‘if
the world’s poor masses needed a ‘theodicy of suffering’, the fortunate
few also required a ‘theodicy of fortune” (Adair-Toteff 2013: 102). To
claim this right is to be convinced that this privileged condition is deserved,
and above all, to possess a more deserving claim than others. Religion,
therefore, operates as the instrument to enact this claim through a theod-
icy whose effects in the life of society are—and must be—widely visible.
It is mainly on this level that the affinities between Weber and Bourdieu
are most evident. As we have already said, according to Bourdieu theo-
dicies are always sociodicies, that is, they have the sole twofold function
of naturalizing the privileges of the dominant classes and providing the
dominated classes with compensatory rewards, in short: granting ‘justi-
fications for existing in a determinate social position and existing as they
exist, that is, with all the properties that are socially attached to them’
(Bourdieu 1991: 16). This applies both to religion and, analogically, to
much else. Thus we have the sociodicy of the scholastic (and intellectual)
field—extending historically to the wider field of power—that consecrates
the dominant class in the form of ‘IQ racism’3 as well as the sociodicy

3
 ‘IQ racism is a racism of the dominant class that differs in a host of ways from what is
generally called racism, that’s to say the petit-bourgeois racism which is the central target of
most classic critiques of racism, including the most vigorous of them, such as that by Sartre.
This racism is characteristic of a dominant class whose reproduction depends to a large extent
on the transmission of cultural capital, an inherited capital that has the property of being an
embodied, and therefore apparently natural, innate, capital. […] It is what causes the domi-
nant class to feel justified in being dominant: they feel themselves to be essentially superior’
(Bourdieu 1993: 177).
316  R. ALCIATI

of contemporary society, based on the alleged objectivity of neo-liberal

economies,4 the male sociodicy derived from the androcentric vision of
the world, which legitimizes a relationship of domination by inscribing it
in a social construction disguised as biology.5
Some of these references to Bourdieu’s writings are mentioned in the
‘Sociodicée’ entry by Denord (2020). However, some more consider-
ations can be added. In the lectures published posthumously under the
title Sociologie générale, for example, the interest in the theodicy-sociodicy
pair is neither ephemeral nor limited to Bourdieu’s research on the reli-
gious field. The reference to sociodicy becomes relevant whenever atten-
tion is focused on the tendency of each dominant class to strive—if not to
fight—for its own existence, which is guaranteed only by reproduction.
This incessant work is not aimed at realizing an unprecedented hegemonic
project, but rather at simply ensuring ‘the imposition of the legitimate
point of view on the social world’ (Bourdieu 2016: 1056) by the domi-
nants, who wants nothing more than ‘to freeze the field in the state it was
in at the moment of their domination’ (Bourdieu 2020: 224). It is at this
precise moment, Weber would say, that the dominant claim to have a
theodicy of their own privileges. The purpose of any theodicy is therefore
naturalization, or to put it in Marxian language, the universalization of
interests.

Weber, Durkheim, but Especially Marx

In his lecture at the Collège de France on 30 May 1985, Bourdieu says
that his way of doing sociology is the sum of a number of theoretical con-
tributions that are commonly regarded as incompatible: the explicit refer-
ence is to the perspectives of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. These three
théoriciens—as Bourdieu calls them—are very important for understand-
ing what religion is and how it works, but above all their way of dealing
with the subject is logically linked and therefore they can be put in dia-
logue with one another. Moreover, Bourdieu makes clear that materialism,

4
 ‘It is by arming itself with mathematics (and media power) that neo-liberalism has become
the supreme form of the conservative sociodicy that has been announcing itself, for the past
30 years, under the name of ‘the end of ideologies’, or, more recently, of ‘the end of history’
(Bourdieu 1998: 1; translation is mine).
5
 ‘The particular strength of the masculine sociodicy comes from the fact that it combines
and condenses two operations: it legitimates a relationship of domination by embedding it in
a biological nature that is itself a naturalized social construction’ (Bourdieu 2001: 23).
 14  IF THEODICY IS ALWAYS SOCIODICY: BOURDIEU AND THE MARXIAN…  317

when it comes to religion, is not a prerogative of Marx only. Weber,

indeed, can be said to be particularly effective in bringing the materialist
mode of thought into the area where it was particularly weak, namely the
domain of the symbolic. Precisely through his history of religions, Weber
brought out the full logical consequences of a materialist theory of sym-
bolic forms.6
Even though Durkheim and Weber are still considered indispensable
readings for both the scholarly study of religion and the understanding of
Bourdieu’s sociological enterprise, more than 35 years after Bourdieu’s
lecture Marx has no longer the importance he had in those days. This is
undoubtedly true at least for the study of religions, but a progressive lack
of interest in Marx is also perceived among Bourdieu scholars, who, with
a few exceptions,7 have tended to ignore how Bourdieu, despite the
­originality and innovativeness of his conceptual apparatus, ought also to
be fully considered within the Marxist tradition. In what follows I would
like to foreground three aspects of Bourdieu’s theory of religion that are
particularly resonant with Marx’s historical materialism.
The most conspicuous source of this heritage is the active and passive
conception of religion that can be read in the Theses on Feuerbach (1845)
and in the materials, written with Friedrich Engels, known under the title
of The German Ideology (1845–1846). Here, religion is understood not
only as an alienated product, but above all as an instrument producing
alienation. This twofold performance enacted by religion can be related to

6
 ‘One could say—without forcing the issue, I think—that Weber very consciously took
historical materialism to the areas where historical materialism was particularly weak, that is,
to the area of the symbolic. Where, in Marx, we had a sentence that was both fundamental
and a bit simple (‘Religion is the opium of the people’), and a few analyses of the superstruc-
ture, Weber did the whole construction of the theory of religion and of the priesthood,
which—it seems to me—consisted in pushing to its last consequences a materialist theory of
symbolic forms’ (Bourdieu 2016: 771; translation is mine). But the relationship between
Marx and Weber had already come into focus a few years earlier, for example: ‘I must say
that, on this decisive point, my reading of Max Weber—who, far from opposing Marx, as is
generally thought, with a spiritualist theory of history, in fact carries the materialist mode of
thought into areas which Marxist materialism effectively abandons to spiritualism—helped
me greatly in arriving at this kind of generalized materialism; this will be a paradox only to
those who have an over-simple view of Weber’s thought, owing to the combined effect of the
rarity of translations, the one-sidedness of the early French and American interpretations, and
the perfunctory anathemas pronounced by ‘Marxist’ orthodoxy’ (Bourdieu 1990: 17).
7
 According to Bridget Fowler, for example, the tools Bourdieu forged to understand how
domination works and how it reproduces itself are a clear sign of this theoretical approach
(Fowler 2011, 2018).
318  R. ALCIATI

the Bourdieusian conception of ‘structured structures’ and ‘structuring

structures’. In this respect, the study of religion cannot be separated from
the study of the society, because the ‘analysis of the internal structure of
the religious message cannot ignore with impunity the sociologically con-
structed functions that it fulfills first for the groups that produce it and
then for the groups that consume it’ (Bourdieu 1991: 11–12, emphasis is
mine). Moreover, in order to avoid an incomplete interpretation, Bourdieu
adds that religion should be regarded as a language, ‘that is both an instru-
ment of communication and an instrument of knowledge or, more pre-
cisely, as a symbolic medium at once structured (therefore receptive to
structural analysis) and structuring, as a condition of possibility of the
primordial form of consensus that is the agreement on the meaning of
signs and on the meaning of the world that they permit one to construct’
(Bourdieu 1991: 2). To structure a (new) consensus on the signs and
meaning of the world implies that we recognize the existence of an ideo-
logical demand from a certain moment onwards and in certain social
classes, that is, the expectation of a systematic message capable of giving a
unitary meaning to life. ‘Such a message would propose a coherent vision
of the world and human existence to its privileged addressees and give
them the means to achieve the more or less systematic regulation of their
everyday behaviour. It would, therefore, at the same time be capable of
providing them with justifications of their existence in its specific form, that
is, their existence as occupants of a determinate social position’ (Bourdieu
1987: 124).
The ideological demand to which Bourdieu refers constitutes the sec-
ond clear link with Marx. Although it is generally believed that Bourdieu
rejects the Marxian concept of ideology (Hauchecorne 2020), the above-­
mentioned passage shows that a robust similarity is detectable instead, at
least when ideology is related to religion or similar strategies of univer-
salizing particular interests.8 On one point, however, Bourdieu tends to
strongly emphasize his distance from Marx—or probably from the Marxist
orthodoxy originating from Marx. Bourdieu rejects the widespread misun-
derstanding that the word ‘ideology’ is always associated with a discourse

8
 ‘To understand how ideologies dominate, the process of universalization is very impor-
tant. It consists in transforming a discourse valid for a few into a universal discourse, valid for
all’ (Bourdieu 2016: 795; translation is mine).
 14  IF THEODICY IS ALWAYS SOCIODICY: BOURDIEU AND THE MARXIAN…  319

(or discourses) and never with a practice.9 The school system, for example,
represents an impressive ideology in practice, that is, a practice that embod-
ies the ideology of the gift, according to which the most gifted are the best
and the best are the most gifted (Bourdieu 2016: 1057). Understood in
this way, every theodicy is and works as an ideology, a discourse consistent
with the claim of systematicity and intended to justify (and not to judge)
the domination of particular social groups by naturalizing their very exis-
tence as dominant groups (Bourdieu 2016: 1056). As in Marx, therefore,
religion (i.e. theodicy) becomes synonymous with ideology, that is, with
an autonomous form of knowledge capable of producing reality. Ideology
belongs to the world of ideas, but in particular to the world of dominant
ideas, which are both bearers of partisan interests and instruments of con-
trol and class domination. In fact, both for Marx and Bourdieu, ideology
is not the same as culture. Ideology, unlike culture, ‘denotes those values
and symbolic practices which at any given time are caught up in the busi-
ness of maintaining political power’ (Eagleton 2016: 53). Insofar as the
ruling class has every interest in reproducing itself, ideology—as well as
being a major representation of the alienated world—also presents itself as
an alienating tool, that is, as an instrument of conservation and reproduc-
tion of that kind of world. The twofold function is carried out by religion,
here understood as an ideology. As two historians of religions—who, still
in the late 1990s, considered it important to return to Marx’s thought for
a new study of religions—wrote: ‘Ideologies—especially religious ideolo-
gies—are powerful largely because they are shared systems of belief, and
because those classes and groups who benefit from them profess them as
wholeheartedly as do the others’ (Grottanelli and Lincoln 1998: 322).
One last observation on this point. As is well known, for Marx religion
is an ideology necessarily resulting from historical life-processes, that is,
from the human beings’ experiences of political and social reality: ‘it is
not religion that creates man but man who creates religion’ (Marx 1972:
30). The Marxian motto finds an echo in Bourdieu’s argument that, in
order to think about the world, the human beings often only have access
to thought that is the product of that same world: ‘[the] doxic comprehen-
sion is a possession possessed or, you could say, an alienated appropriation’

9
 Indeed, Marx also maintains something similar, when he writes that ‘the production of
the ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material
activity and the material intercourse of men—the language of real life’ (Marx and Engels
1998: 42).
320  R. ALCIATI

(Bourdieu 2014: 107). Moreover, once again, from this anti-intellectualist

posture it follows that domination must be considered inscribed in bodies
and not in the logic of discourses (Paolucci 2018b: 95).
A third and final element of the comparison between Marx and
Bourdieu can be found in the former’s Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844. Here Marx directly addresses the problem of private
property and points out that the ultimate cause of social inequality is the
division of labour. The division of labour is a decidedly neglected herme-
neutic category—at least in the study of religion. Yet it could be particu-
larly useful in the analysis of religious beliefs. According to Bourdieu,
competition for religious power takes place, as in any field, through objec-
tive relations between and among agents and institutions.

On the one hand, this system of interests and this religious authority derive
from the agent’s or institution’s position in the division of labour currently
pertaining within the sphere of the symbolic manipulation of the laity. On
the other, they result from the respective position of each in the objective
structure of the relations of specifically religious authority which define the
religious field. (Bourdieu 1987: 126)

Here Bourdieu alludes, almost verbatim, to what Marx and Engels

write in The German Ideology: ‘Division of labour only becomes truly such
from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears’
(Marx and Engels 1998: 50). Only from this moment consciousness
thinks of itself as something distinct and really able to conceive of some-
thing other without conceiving something real, out there. Bourdieu starts
exactly from here to elaborate his theory of the religious field. In other
words, every organized complexity is a complexity that has arisen at some
point, and every complexity that has arisen has ‘violent’ origins. Violence
is all the greater as a more radical level of complexity is achieved; every
symbolic violence has material beginnings.

The Relentless Critique of Religion

If the structuring-structured couple—ideology and the division of
labour—can be considered points of alignment between Marx and
Bourdieu, then Bourdieu’s two 1971 articles on the religious field might
have the intention of going beyond Weber without rejecting his theoreti-
cal foundations, whilst also recovering what Marx had said about religion,
and in particular about the symbolic violence of religion. For Bourdieu, as
 14  IF THEODICY IS ALWAYS SOCIODICY: BOURDIEU AND THE MARXIAN…  321

for Marx, the mere awareness of this condition is not enough. That is, the
mere critical and materialist interpretation of religion is insufficient. Hence
Bourdieu’s methodological invitation is to proceed from the critique of
religion to the dispute on the ground of politics and economics. Insofar as
the religious field, like any field, can be only quasi autonomous, the critical
study of religion cannot be separated from the (equally critical) study of
politics and economics. For Bourdieu, what is needed is a ‘practical’ cri-
tique, which, as Marx would say, makes use of the weapon of criticism,
without renouncing the criticism of the weapon.
This probably explains why the theme of religion not being a direct
object of ‘struggle’ is not investigated continuously and in depth. In fact,
Bourdieu’s references to the historical aspects of religions are scanty, whilst
the relationship between religion and politics are also not developed as an
autonomous theme. However, this reticence does not imply that Bourdieu
considers it to be an insignificant issue. So much so that he proposes cat-
egories and methods of the critique of religion as a model for other cri-
tiques. Without saying it explicitly, Bourdieu pursues the Marxian dictum
according to which ‘the critique of religion is the prerequisite of every
critique’ (Marx 1972: 131).
Thus, in fact, the term ‘field’ can pass from the context of the critique
of religion to that of critique of politics, economics, art, literature, and so
on. It therefore follows that Bourdieu sees a very close homology between
the relatively autonomous mechanisms of the exchange of symbolic goods,
where the religious field operates as a master code. It could be tentatively
said that, in political life, the state is to society as, in religion, ‘heaven’ is to
earth. This continuous mirroring, and the consequent doubling of man’s
life into ‘heavenly’ and ‘earthly’, has not only an epistemological founda-
tion but also bears aetiological implications: it is the same process taking
place in the religious and in the political field. Marx puts things differently,
but the bottom line is the same:

That is to say, not of setting out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor
from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at
men in the flesh; but setting out from real, active men, and on the basis of
their real life-process demonstrating the development of the ideological
reflexes and echoes of this life-process. […] Morality, religion, metaphysics,
and all the rest of ideology as well as forms of consciousness corresponding
to these, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. (Marx and
Engels 1998: 42)
322  R. ALCIATI

Once again, Bourdieu agrees with Marx (and Engels) that both the
transcendental deduction of categories and the thought process that
moves from abstract ideas to social practices to account for reality are two
wrong paths, or better, are a form of illusion created by the very material
conditions of existence. On this, Marx and Bourdieu totally agree.
In this sense, the two 1971 essays on the religious field can be read as
an example of a critique of religion. Since Bourdieu’s political subversion
presupposes a cognitive subversion ultimately leading to a different view
of the world and its representation, religion itself, as a possible worldview
inherent to belonging to that field is the perfect, quintessential target.
Religion (and its effects) in fact proves to be persistent in human history.
Today, just as yesterday, religious figures function as an ideological cover
for the dominant mode of production, and therefore the critique of reli-
gion also offers critical theory the possibility of unmasking other alienated
ideological forms. Think of the comparison between divinity and money
or the correspondence between the Catholic belief in the objective efficacy
(ex opere operato) of the sacraments and the belief that persists in the politi-
cal economy of the capitalist system in the total objectivity of the mone-
tary system. This, once again, applies to both Marx and Bourdieu. Marx
dwells on it in the Manuscripts of 1844, while Bourdieu trades on the same
analogy in his General Sociology, where, in order to summarize his dis-
course on the state—in a paragraph entitled ‘The State and God’—he says
that what underlies the central discourse on power might be called the
‘myth of the central bank’, that is to say the myth of that place where all
acts of guarantee are guaranteed. The ‘hidden god’ of the state is, like the
central bank, the only entity capable of acting as lender of last resort
(Bourdieu 2016: 806–807).

Conclusion
All things considered we could conclude by saying that, once Bourdieu’s
fruitful and profound relationship with Marx recovered, the centrality of
religion and its critique would be rediscovered too. In a very recent article,
Bridget Fowler tried to challenge what she called ‘the orthodoxy concern-
ing the heritage of Pierre Bourdieu’, according to which Bourdieu failed
to provide a theory of social change (Fowler 2020). Fowler argued that
this is a superficial judgement, since Bourdieu’s sociology offers a theory
of social transformation, thus allowing for emancipatory action. Yet to
trace this theory one must read the rich sub-text of his writings, which
 14  IF THEODICY IS ALWAYS SOCIODICY: BOURDIEU AND THE MARXIAN…  323

constantly allude to the possibility of resorting to heterodox beliefs pro-

moted by prophets who try to dispel the current doxa.
Whether Bourdieu presented a critical sociology or is even he is a ‘criti-
cal theorist’ himself is still extremely controversial (see, e.g. Honneth
1984). He was surely critical of the social order and therefore at least sug-
gested being placed himself in the tradition of a critical theory (Bauer and
Bittlingmayer 2014: 58). In this regard, religion seems to play a key role
in his theory of practice and in the ‘concatenated set of critiques’ (Paolucci
2018a: 21) proposed by Bourdieu. We would call this centrality the
Bourdieusian critique of religion, the fundamental motifs of which are all
already present in his early writings, while receiving explication and elabo-
ration at different times. Reading Bourdieu as an interpreter, albeit a very
acute one, of what exists, and therefore as a passive observer of the repro-
ductive power of the dominant power relations, is decidedly easier. But
also hasty.

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ed. Gisèle Sapiro, 433–434. Paris: CNRS Editions.
Honneth, Axel. 1984. Die zerrissene Welt der symbolischen Formen. Zum kultur-
soziologischen Werk Pierre Bourdieus. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und
Sozialpsychologie 36: 127–164.
Maduro, Otto. 2007. Preface. In Terry Rey, Bourdieu on Religion: Imposing Faith
and Legitimacy, vii–viii. Abingdon: Routledge.
Marx, Karl. 1972 [1927]. Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’. Ed. and trans.
Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1998 [1932]. The German Ideology: Including
Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy.
Amherst: Prometheus Books.
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Paolucci, Gabriella. 2018a. L’enigma dell’affrancamento dal dominio. In Bourdieu

e Marx: Pratiche della critica, ed. Gabriella Paolucci, 89–122. Udine-­
Milan: Mimesis.
———. 2018b. Introduzione: Eredi, Bourdieu, Marx e noi. In Bourdieu e Marx:
Pratiche della critica, ed. Gabriella Paolucci, 9–32. Udine-Milan: Mimesis.
Rey, Terry. 2007. Bourdieu on Religion: Imposing Faith and Legitimacy. Abingdon:
Routledge.
———. 2018. Pierre Bourdieu and the Study of Religion: Recent Developments,
Directions, and Departures. In The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu, ed.
Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J.  Sallaz. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfor
dhb/9780199357192.013.13.
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Religionssoziologie. Baden-Baden: Ergon.
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Gisèle Sapiro, 734–736. Paris: CNRS Editions.
Swartz, David. 1996. Bridging the Study of Culture and Religion: Pierre
Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Symbolic Power. Sociology of Religion
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Taoismus. Schriften 1915–1920. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, Band 1/19, eds.
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———. 2001. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Religiöse Gemeinschaften. Max Weber
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Schilm and also Jutta Niemeier. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck).
 CHAPTER 15

Bourdieu’s Lesson: Marx vs. Althusser?

Fabio Raimondi

De te fabula narratur1
Bourdieu’s and Althusser’s writings bear all the signs of a theoretical and
political conflict that goes beyond personal relationships. There are numer-
ous traces of this battle in Bourdieu’s texts, where we can find explicit and
implicit criticisms of Althusser.2 Yet, Althusser on the other hand, seems to
extend a deathly silence over Bourdieu’s works. I say he “seems” because,
even though Bourdieu is rarely (if ever) mentioned, he is sometimes
evoked. However, the similarity of the issues and problems faced by the

1
 The story is about you. Many thanks to S., as usual, for her help and support.
2
 Althusser is mentioned by Bourdieu, perhaps for the first time, in an essay written with
Passeron in 1967, where his anti-humanism is stigmatized (Bourdieu and Passeron 1967:
166). I then recall, for example, and without pretence of being exhaustive, both the critical
references contained in In Other Words, in which his detachment from structuralism of
Althusser and Foucault is motivated by their tendency to abolish “agents”—as Lévi-Strauss
had already done—considering them “mere epiphenomena of the structure” (cf. Bourdieu
1990: 4, 8, 20–21); he also affirms that his Algerian experience, lived alongside workers and
the unemployed underclass, including peasants without land, had led him to break with the
Althusserian discourse on “Workers, Proletarians and the Party” (cf. Bourdieu 2008a: 26).

F. Raimondi (*)
University of Udine, Udine, Italy
e-mail: fabio.raimondi@uniud.it

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 327

Switzerland AG 2022
G. Paolucci (ed.), Bourdieu and Marx, Marx, Engels, and
Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_15
328  F. RAIMONDI

two authors is striking, so as to lead one to hypothesize the existence of a

sort of remote duel. A duel that Bourdieu clarifies at certain points whilst
Althusser, instead, fights against the social sciences in general, because
they are, in his opinion—and it is a constantly reiterated judgement—only
an expression of bourgeois ideology.
Since I cannot reconstruct the duel in its entirety and complexity here,
so as to measure its extent and to understand its scope, I shall limit my
analysis to a specific episode, through which my only purpose is to outline
some initial and provisional lines of reasoning.
In an essay written in 1975, Bourdieu examines the “paralogism” (a
false reasoning that seems true) or “fallacy”—a “very particular form of
abuse of power”—which consists in “speaking the false […] with all the
logical appearances of the truth” (Bourdieu 2001a: 327).3 Here, Bourdieu
attacks Althusser by criticizing an essay written by Balibar (1973).
Bourdieu’s intention is to show that Balibar’s essay is structured rhetorically
by “scholastic reason” (for a complete definition, see: Bourdieu 1998,
2000), and that paralogism is a dangerous and difficult practice to unmask,
especially if “it comes out of the mouth of an ‘authorized person’,” that is
a person who is “endowed with the power of legitimate nomination”
(Bourdieu 2001a: 328). Since the meaning of every discourse depends on
the “social conditions of its production [and] of its reception […], all
forms of discourse analysis that put in parentheses, often without knowing
it, everything that concerns the conditions of production and reception,
often invisible, of these discourses, are an obstacle to the constitution of a
true science of discourse” (Bourdieu 2001a: 328–329). To justify this
position, Bourdieu involves Marx. “Discursive strategies and formal
processes betray the intentions objectively inscribed in the structural
necessities inherent in a position,” Bourdieu writes, “and it is the institution
that expresses itself through a certain institutional rhetoric” (Bourdieu
2001a: 329). Marx was the one who discovered, “behind the rhetorical
effect, the School that produced it by producing the position and
dispositions of its author” (Bourdieu 2001a: 329). As a confirmation of
this, Bourdieu cites a passage from The German Ideology which he uses to
read Balibar’s essay: “one cannot of course blame a petty bourgeois of

3
 The original title of the Bourdieu’s text is La lecture de Marx ou quelques remarques
critiques à propos de «Quelques remarques critiques à propos de “Lire Le Capital”» (The reading
of Marx or some critical remarks about “Some critical remarks about ‘Reading Capital’”), in
which the sarcastic reference to the Althusserian reading of Capital is evident.
 15  BOURDIEU’S LESSON: MARX VS. ALTHUSSER?  329

Berlin who attended ‘the Schools’ [i.e. Stirner] in order to transform the
interested subject into an interesting object by a literary sleight of hand”
(Bourdieu 2001b: 381, drawing).4 Replacing Berlin with Paris and
exploiting the similarity between the Schools [les Écoles] and the Parisian
École par excellence (École Normale Supérieure), the game seems to be
done, because the meaning of the citation is that Balibar, that is, Althusser,
has transformed himself (the “interested subject”) into an “interesting
object” like a petty bourgeois who studied at the École: exactly as Marx
and Engels (who Bourdieu never mentions, although The German Ideology
is constantly quoted) reproached Stirner who had studied in Berlin
schools.
Apart some venial inaccuracies, which Bourdieu certainly cannot be
reproached with—Althusser was not from Paris (and neither was Balibar),
but also Stirner was not from Berlin—because some literary licence must
be granted if the aim is to forge a good analogy, the trick would have been
successful if we did not remember—and I should not be reproached for
this fact—that Bourdieu had also studied at the École and that, therefore,
even though he was not from Paris, he finds himself, by reason of his own
analogy, in the role of Stirner. The joke could obviously continue, making
Marx and Engels wear Sancho’s clothes and then even myself, although no
one is from Paris and had studied at the École: Marx, in fact, was not from
Berlin, but had studied there (even though he graduated in Jena). Engels,
on the other hand, only spent his military service in Berlin, during which
he followed Schelling’s lectures with interest. And if Marx had undoubt-
edly attended “the schools,” this cannot be entirely said of the latter.5
Perhaps it is a secondary reason, but that Marx and Engels preferred to
leave The German Ideology to the “gnawing criticism of the mice,” after
knowing that due “to changed circumstances it could not be printed”
(Marx 1987: 264), rather than trying to publish it elsewhere, could also
be linked to their knowledge that they could easily have been reproached

4
 In this passage, the French translation used by Bourdieu deviates from the German text.
Without going into philological details, here are the references useful to find the quotation
from the text of Marx and Engels: French, see Marx and Engels 1968: 488. German, see
Marx and Engels 1973: 431. English, see Marx and Engels 1975: 445.
5
 Engels never graduated and was withdrawn from the Elberfeld Gymnasium before the
end of the final year. At the age of seventeen, in fact, his pious father put him to work in the
commercial office of his factory in Barmen and the following year (1838) sent him to Bremen
to gain experience in the linen export company of the Saxon consul Heinrich Leupold (cf.
Hunt 2009).
330  F. RAIMONDI

for having performed the same “literary sleight of hand” with which they
charged Stirner. This aspect may not be negligible in the “self-­clarification”
that Marx says they had themselves undertaken, after the publication of
the Holy Family.

The Irresistible Attraction of the Role

of the “King”

Since Bourdieu’s criticism of Althusser takes place on a rhetorical level, I’ll

place myself within this field without raising issues of content which,
although underlying, are clearly visible in Bourdieu’s arguments.
Bourdieu’s text is composed by articulating four different levels of
discourse, even if he explicitly names only three (cf. Bourdieu 2001b: 379,
n. **—the note is marked with two asterisks, rather than a number as
usually): his own text (P),6 which comments on the style of Balibar’s text
(E or pre-text), some excerpts of which, framed in special windows, are
reproduced inside P.  To carry out this operation, Bourdieu uses, by
contrast, some passages taken from The German Ideology attributed only
to Marx (K or super text, in the sense of Freudian Super-Ego), reported in
P, all inside special windows and accompanied by drawings. The fourth
discourse, openly evoked but invisible, because never mentioned, is the
Althusserian one—L or (s)ur-text—because it is, at the same time, both
the original-­text (“ur”), that is the true source of Bourdieu’s reasoning,
and the text that sur-determines P (“sur”: over).
It could be said that P reads E through K to hit L, but this is the mere
appearance. From a topological point of view, a different rhetorical struc-
ture emerges from Bourdieu’s essay: P reads L through E to appropriate
K, as to get K (the signifier “Marx” and, I repeat, Marx-without-Engels)
out of the monopoly (real or imaginary it does not matter) exercised by
Althusser’s reading of Marx with the intention of neutralizing it. K is the
signifier that commands the operation and, therefore, is the real theoreti-
cal and political stake in Bourdieu’s discourse, which, only by appropriat-
ing K, can think of neutralizing L and acquiring in this way the symbolic
capital (real or imaginary it does not matter, but certainly existing for
Bourdieu) represented by L. The rhetorical artifice of including excerpts
from E and K inside P, isolating them from their contexts by means of
boxes and vignettes, is by no means without meaning.

 The letters correspond to the initials of the first names of the authors involved.
6
 15  BOURDIEU’S LESSON: MARX VS. ALTHUSSER?  331

The silence about Engels and Althusser is not accidental: and if the
silence about the first is perhaps involuntary, that silence about the second
is certainly intentional. Engels represents, in fact, among many other
things, the attempt, clearly undertaken starting from the Anti-Dühring
and with the approval of Marx (cf. Engels 1987a: 9), to construct a phi-
losophy that expounded in the clearest way the principles of their theoreti-
cal and political positions. Apart from the fact that Althusser almost always
refers to this operation with the name in use among Marxists, “dialectical
materialism,” what is at stake, in addition to the anti-Stalinist controversy,
is the status and the role of philosophy in the communist field,7 so much
so that Althusser never lost the reference to Engels even in his latest writ-
ings. Therefore, the object of Bourdieu’s essay is the style that philosophy
uses to construct its own symbolic capital and its own theoretical and
political authority. Bourdieu, in fact, despite his departure from philoso-
phy, did not want to expel it from the set of disciplines indispensable to
construct a theoretical discourse, but he wishes to undergo it to the scru-
tiny of “practices” and to the procedure of “reflexivity” for identifying its
conditions of existence (cf. Bourdieu 1998: 130–131, 2000). Perhaps in
the case of Engels, certainly in that of Althusser, Bourdieu saw—incor-
rectly in my opinion—the lack of interest in knowing these conditions; a
detachment from which derived, according to Bourdieu, the haughty and
aristocratic pose of the philosopher-king held by Althusser and imitated by
his young students.
But let’s get to something less hypothetical. What does it mean,
rhetorically, to criticize Althusser by referring to Marx?
Also here, different plans are intertwined. First, it is evident that
Bourdieu uses The German Ideology as a principle of authority which
should hold true for Balibar/Althusser and which he recognizes as such

7
 I dealt with this topic in Raimondi, 2011a, to which I’ll take the liberty of referring. For
a different interpretation, which however captures only some aspects of the Althusserian
operation, see Aron 1970 (who, by the way, was from Paris and had studied at the École),
where he said that the essay was written, essentially, between August 1967 and August 1968.
I believe that Aron’s text is one of the undeclared sources of Bourdieu’s reasoning, although
when it was published the two had already broken off their relationship both as result of
Bourdieu’s early works on the school system and because of their dissent about the French
May. We must not in fact forget that Bourdieu was Aron’s assistant at the Sorbonne, and
Aron had appointed him co-director of the Centre de sociologie européenne (Center for
European Sociology), which was founded in cooperation with the Ford foundation (cf.
Paolucci 2011: 135–136).
332  F. RAIMONDI

for himself too. The words of Marx-without-Engels, in fact, should serve

as a call to greater attention to the social conditions (political, historical,
biographical, cultural, etc.) that generate the specific habitus from which
every discourse springs. There is no doubt, moreover, that these words
should be valid as a warning to anyone who declares himself a Marxist but
disregards the methodological indications of Marx (and Engels), although
he claims to want to continue and complete their work. The German
Ideology is not chosen by chance, given the watershed role it plays in the
Althusserian periodization that distinguishes the “young” and the “old”
Marx, and given the importance it has for the definition of the set of prob-
lems in which Althusser places its own philosophical practice. Bourdieu’s
intent is to highlight the contradiction in which Althusser and his pupils
fall when they adopt an exclusively logical style—which is ridiculed by the
author to whom they refer, that is, Marx—to define their own theoretical
and political identity. Therefore, even though they call themselves Marxists,
they are not.
But using a principle of authority to criticize and dismiss his own
opponents (theorists and politicians) is a contradiction in the operation
that Bourdieu would like to carry out. In fact, invoking an authority is
not the same as producing a scientific critique, which Bourdieu aspires
to, of behaviours considered deplorable. On the contrary, this procedure
means investing himself with the role of “guardian of the authenticity of
the message” and therefore with the “authority of whom proposes him-
self to possess the truth (autorité sacerdotale)” carrying with it “the right
of correction,” thus delimiting “what is ‘truly Marxist’”: exactly a proce-
dure Bourdieu ascribes to Althusser (Bourdieu 2001b: 383, 385–386).
And just as he had accused Althusser of having studied at the École, as if
he had not studied there too, so now he reproaches Althusser for a
behaviour that he himself has engaged in. Even if Bourdieu’s intention
had only been to highlight the abuse of the philosophical practice of
(pro)posing criteria to distinguish true from false (or what is correct
from what is not, orthodoxy from heterodoxy, etc.), it is impossible not
to highlight that, trying to obtain this result through the reference to
the Authority “Marx-without-­Engels,” Bourdieu comes to play the same
deplorable role that he attributes to Althusser. Moreover, he does not
grasp at all the heterodoxy of the Althusserian reading of Marx and
Marxism (cf. Raimondi 2011b: 329–331), thus becoming, despite him-
self, the supporter of orthodoxy.
 15  BOURDIEU’S LESSON: MARX VS. ALTHUSSER?  333

The use of the principle of authority encounters also other and greater
difficulties. First, it entails the same religious and prophetic register that is
attributed to the adversaries. After all, for many Marxists, even if not for
all (and sometimes not even for Althusser), Marx and Engels are not the
Bible, and only by applying their teachings to their own texts is it possible
to continue their work and convey their style. Is it, therefore, more coher-
ent to think of being able to continue and complete the work of the
‘fathers’ of Marxism in the name of the principles of their political theory
and practice, even at the cost of moving away from their specific analyses,
rather than to refer to them as if they were indisputable authorities?
And that’s not all. According to Bourdieu, “the usurpation of symbolic
power” (legitimately held by whom or by what?) is the result of an “author-
ity [which] asserts itself […] affirming itself” (Bourdieu 2001b: 390–391)
through a series of stylistic tricks—but for an author who recognizes and
praises the performative nature of language this should not be a scandal.
Among these tricks there is the “debanalization (débanalisation),” which
implies the idea of ​​an “integrity [and of an] authenticity of the message”
that offers the paradigm of any possible “deviation”; consequently, the
real Althusserian purpose is mirrored by the fact that he does not only seek

to understand Marx better than Marx, to surpass the (young) Marx in the
name of the (old) Marx, to correct the “pre-Marxist” Marx, who survives in
Marx, in the name of the truly Marxist Marx, who produces a more Marxist
“reading” of Marx, [but that he seeks also to] accumulate in this way the
benefits of identification with the original prophet—that is, the intellectual
and political authority associated with membership—and the benefits of the
distinction. (Bourdieu 2001b: 382–383)

From the point of view proposed by Bourdieu, referring to the “young”

Marx against the “old” Marx (or to humanism against determinism or
structuralism—as Bourdieu himself points out in 1990: 4), as some were
doing, even within the French Communist Party (cf. Geerlandt 1978), it
is not much different from doing the opposite—that is, referring to the
“old” against the “young,” and Althusser was not doing this (cf. Resnick
and Wolff 1987)—since in this case the stakes would still have been the
imposition of an Authority and, therefore, of an orthodoxy. Furthermore,
how do we combine the following statement by Bourdieu with his
reproach in 1975 of Althusser’s intention to overcome Marx?
334  F. RAIMONDI

I have often pointed out, especially with regard to my relation to Max

Weber, that you can think with a thinker against that thinker. […] To say
that you can think at the same time with and against a thinker means radi-
cally contradicting the classificatory logic in accordance with which people
are accustomed—almost everywhere, alas, but especially in France—to think
of the relation you have with the thought of the past. For Marx, as Althusser
said, or against Marx. I think you can think with Marx against Marx.
(Bourdieu 1990: 49)8

At first Bourdieu reproaches Althusser for wanting to go beyond Marx

and then for placing an either-or: “with Marx” or “against Marx.” Are we
facing heterogeneous speculative ends or, as Bourdieu might have pre-
ferred to call them, reflexive ends? The point is that Bourdieu’s critical
operation has principally a political purpose rather than a theoretical tenor.
The recourse to the “young” Marx, in fact, is the tool with which, in
France and beyond, many were trying to escape the influence of Stalinism
(even after Stalin’s death), in which many Communist parties were still
immersed, including the French one. Hence the unbridgeable gap between
Bourdieu and Althusser: while Althusser tried to free the Party from
Stalinism without relinquishing the thought of Marx and Engels, and
remained, until 1980—despite many contradictions—within the Party,
which he spared any severe criticism, Bourdieu believed that this was pos-
sible only by refusing to join the Party, and above all by recovering the
“young” Marx’s thought that seemed less compromised with the official
Soviet doctrine.
Actually, the Althusserian cutting remarks against humanism have
nothing to do with the lack of interest in the emancipation of the proletariat
because they aim at two very specific targets. The first is the concept of
“man,” which Marx already said should be abandoned as a bourgeois con-
cept, because the man who acts as the foundation and myth of capitalism
is the man of “civil society,” the “egoistic” man (cf. Marx 1975a: 317,
1975b: 166), whose idea is obtained speculatively, that is, idealistically, as
shown in the Holy Family and in The German Ideology (especially in the
long chapter on “Saint Max” used by Bourdieu to attack Althusser). The
second target is the USSR, where Stalin’s proclamation of “the end of the
dictatorship of the proletariat” in 1936 had consequently put an end (by

8
 Even the use of “the self of he who claims to possess the truth (le je sacerdotale)” with
which Bourdieu reproached Althusser does not seem to have a different function here,
“modesty” included (cf. Bourdieu 2001b: 382).
 15  BOURDIEU’S LESSON: MARX VS. ALTHUSSER?  335

decree!) to the class struggle and proclaimed that the Soviet State was “no
longer a class State but the State of the whole people (of everyone),” with
the effect of welcoming, albeit with doping doses of cynicism and cun-
ning, precisely the social-democratic perspective of the “(bourgeois) per-
sonal ‘humanism’” and preparing the dowry for Communists to get
married to “Christian or bourgeois liberal humanism” (Althusser
2005: 222).

“King: I Fill a Place, I Know’t”9

Fortunately, Althusser explicitly answered Bourdieu’s essay of 1975 in a
text written in 1976. Les vaches noires [The Black Cows] (a long “imagi-
nary interview” about the Party) remained buried for forty years within
the archive of the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC)
and has only recently been published. Althusser first reiterates that
“psychology, […] sociology [and] psychosociology” belong to bourgeois
ideology (as Comte’s and Durkheim’s theories demonstrate), and then he
adds that the same must be said of

Weber, the authority of the most “audacious”, of the most “advanced” […],
of the most “free” (at least in the eyes of his own self-awareness) among the
schools of French sociology; [the school] which mulls over the concept of
habitus, as [it were] the solution to all the problems it does not pose; [the
school which], very rhetorically, gives lessons in rhetoric to those who try to
get involved in politics, and which has the kindness to remind those who try
to fight within the School the outcome of its own great empirical researches
(to [show that] they are not afraid [of facing] the concrete!). Research that
proves by interposed “reproduction” that, in any case, [it is] useless to
mobilize since nothing changes nothing. In terms of social democratic soci-
ology, i.e., in terms of class collaboration posing as a “leftist” no one can do
better. (Althusser 2016: 178–179)

The contemptuous tone of the answer shows open hostility. By reducing

sociology to rhetoric and, therefore, to a political weapon (albeit of a
moderate and reformist politics), Althusser demands that Bourdieu answer
the same accusation that Bourdieu had formulated against him. Bourdieu
wrote that

9
 Shakespeare 1956, a. I, sc. II.
336  F. RAIMONDI

the struggle for the monopoly of the legitimate commentary on Capital

(see Reading Capital) would not be so fierce if it did not have as its stake,
in reality, the immense symbolic capital represented by Marxism, the only
theory of the social world which is effective both in the political field and in
the intellectual field (hence what could be called the Lenin syndrome—see
Lenin and philosophy—one of the forms that the dream of the philosopher-­
king takes among intellectuals). (Bourdieu 2001b: 385)10

In the face of these words, it is not clear how Bourdieu could think of
evading the same accusation, since with all his reasoning he has positioned
himself, by objectifying himself, in the same playing field and with a sym-
metrical purpose of that of his opponent: to put sociology, that is, the
sociologist-king, in the place of the philosopher-king, and therefore to
deliver the lesson, as he was reproached by someone who is not from Paris
but had studied at the École (cf. Rancière 1984).11
The only possibility that Bourdieu had to escape the contradiction and
occupy the place usurped by philosophy and philosophers without assum-
ing the role of “king” was to build a science, that is, the rigorous study of
“a relatively autonomous intellectual field.” Philosophy, on the contrary,
has done (and does) nothing other than “bring properly political strategies
onto the ground of intellectual struggles,” thus coming to “suspend […],
in the name of the need for ‘struggle’, all written and unwritten rules
which regulate” scientific knowledge (Bourdieu 2001b: 385). It must be
acknowledged that Bourdieu spent his entire life building this science, just
as it must be recognized that it offers many interesting ideas for those who
still want to think and act following the path traced by Marxism.
Behind the skirmishes of rhetoric there is not only the relationship
between philosophy and sociology, but, in Marxist terms, the relationship
10
 That after 1965 Althusser had revised his own idea of philosophy is irrelevant for
Bourdieu, who could have read at least Althusser, 1976: 67–70, where self-criticism is not
“the supreme form of self-celebration” (Bourdieu 2001b: 393), nor evocative of the Stalinists
mock trials, nor of the psychodrama of many self-styled alternative groups of the extra-
parliamentary left, but is rather a correction which, whilst not being completely
misunderstood, must be read in the light of the philosophy of the approximation, developed
by Bachelard 1927: a text that Bourdieu knew well, given the importance that French
historical epistemology has for his sociology.
11
 Rancière is a master in this type of operation because he cut his teeth on Althusser (cf.
Rancière 2011).
 15  BOURDIEU’S LESSON: MARX VS. ALTHUSSER?  337

between historical materialism and dialectical materialism, between sci-

ence (of history and social formations) and philosophy. And if for Bourdieu,
Marx-without-Engels is only one of the components of the sociology (as
science) that he would have liked to build, for Althusser, however, Marx
and Engels are the fundamental components of his philosophy, although
also not the only ones.
This was the battlefield where the duellists challenged each other, and I
believe that we should start from here to begin to trace the relationship
between their works with more precision.
The science, which Bourdieu and Althusser aimed at, albeit in different
and irreconcilable ways, is the attempt to know not only an object, but
also the subject which, by defining and constructing it, finds itself, in some
way, contained in it. Objectifying the subject, as Bourdieu wanted, or
thinking about its presuppositions, as Althusser wanted, are two different
ways of achieving the goal and, as such, they are not necessarily incompat-
ible with each other. However, they are incompatible in these two authors
for reasons that essentially concern their political positions, and for these
reasons they cannot be combined in a synthesis that saves them, understands
them, and overcomes them. It is not enough to objectify the construction
of the subject-king nor is it enough to know its theoretical and political
presuppositions to get rid of it, just as it is not enough to be aware of one’s
own role and of the fact that one is only “filling a place,” as Shakespeare
said, to be good kings.
For example, why did Bourdieu not analyse scientifically—rather than
simply reproach Althusser for a continuity with the pose of the Sartrean
philosopher—and why did he not research the influence that the attitude
and the arguments of Althusser and his companions had over a certain
public or audience, of which he himself was a part? Perhaps it is too much
an Althusserian question, but it has the merit, I believe, of taking us out
from the shallows of the philosopher-king’s speech, and from that one of
the sociologist-king. It’s not just about understanding why someone poses
himself as king—an irreducible problem both on an individual dimension,
perhaps vitiated by an incurable narcissism, and as a structural necessity—
but why someone, who accepts becoming king, takes seriously the idea
of “filling a place,” and, at the same time, why someone takes the play
seriously (perhaps hoping that it will be a comedy). Otherwise, it seems
338  F. RAIMONDI

that a bit of rhetoric, perhaps with an esoteric aura, is enough to explain

the conquest of influential positions, whether imaginary or real.12
And why Althusser, for example, if he believed that the social sciences
produced only a bourgeois ideology, did not study them specifically,
instead of simply repudiating them or tracing them back (as he seems to
implicitly do in his course of 1967—Althusser 1990, 1997) to the process
that vitiates the natural sciences ideologically? Is this sort of ostentatious
denial—Althusser never attenuated it—perhaps an index of the difficulty
of detaching oneself from the spectre of religion as heuristic model of the
ideology that Marx and Engels had proposed borrowing it from
Feuerbach13? Or it is a way of sticking to the judgement of Marx and
Engels when they reproached the first socialist and communist theorists
(utopians) for going “in search [of a] social science […] to create [the]
conditions […] for the emancipation of the proletariat,” a science that,
however, was resolved “into the propaganda and the practical carrying out
of their social plans” (Marx and Engles 1976: 515; Engels 1987a: 246) or
in a form of humanism (and paternalism) which would have liked “to
emancipate [not] a particular class, but all humanity” (Engels 1987a: 20).
Or perhaps, since “social science” was justified in its utopianism by the
then less advanced state of “capitalist production,” does Althusser believe
that the sociology of his time, although different from the first, failed to
acknowledge that historical changes are produced by a “social act”—the
struggle among classes—as opposed to the elaboration of an individual
theory, such as that with which Engels (and Marx) reproached Dühring
(cf. Engels 1987a: 253–254, 301)? Or, finally, is the refusal of sociology a
way of reaffirming the autonomy of the empirical and theoretical field, as
Engels had argued (cf. Engels 1987b: 338)?

12
 In 1975 Althusser was a philosopher famous for the following books: For Marx and
Reading Capital both published in 1965. At the École he was still tutor and administrative
secretary of the prestigious École littéraire (Literary School): cf. Moulier-Boutang 1992:
460. Within the Party he was a simple militant. In 1975 he successfully submitted his PhD
thesis, but then his candidacy for professor was rejected (cf. Althusser 1998: 199–200). And
although the Althusserians had the pose of devotees to a cult (cf. Bourdieu 2001b: 386) and
Althusser “liked to exercise his talents as a political strategist” within the École (cf. Bourdieu
2008b: 87), this certainly did not make them unique in the political panorama of the left
French movements. If Bourdieu’s problem was to replace their prophetic irrationalism with
a science, he would have to ask himself not only what habitus they possessed, but also why
others (few or many) believed them, rather than hastily analysing the phenomenon as he did.
And above all, he should have wondered why he gave them so much credit?
13
 See, for example, how it is still very present in Engels 1987a: 300–302.
 15  BOURDIEU’S LESSON: MARX VS. ALTHUSSER?  339

Regardless, however, of these still immature hypotheses, which require

considerable supplementary investigation, I think that at the centre of
their dispute there was certainly a different way of understanding and
responding to the solicitations posed by Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach and,
specifically, by the problem of “praxis.”14 On the one hand, in fact, it can-
not be understood only in a gnoseological way: if the “critical question
[were] the only way to escape the systematic principle of error represented
by the temptation of the sovereign vision” (Bourdieu 1982: 12), how can
we explain that nothing changes politically, even if we do possess a true
knowledge? On the other hand, the problem of “praxis” cannot be under-
stood only politically, because this would imply its reduction to a mere
voluntaristic exercise. Therefore, the social sciences, like the natural ones,
although different from each other and perfectible, are indispensable for
the knowledge and transformation of reality but, above all, for not falling
into the delirium of omnipotence of one or many, kings, or sovereigns
whatever they are.
Therefore, going into the specifics of the duel between Bourdieu and
Althusser requires that, going beyond rhetoric, the “weapons” have to be
crossed in a field formed by the relationships between sciences and politics.

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14
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