Review of International Political Economy 8:2 Summer 2001: 344–353

Review Essay
PI ER R E BO U R D IEU O N EC O N OM IC S

Pierre Bourdieu, Les structures sociales de l’économie, Paris: Éditions du

Seuil, 2000.

Although entitled ‘the social structures of the economy’, Pierre Bourdieu

has published a book that is basically an empirical study of the housing
market in France. True, in the introduction and conclusion Bourdieu
spells out his critique of contemporary economic method. He lays down
the ‘principles of an economic anthropology’. He also ends his book with
a short postscript on the increasing internationalization of the economy.
Yet, the question is still justiŽed, whether we – as international political
economy scholars – should bother reading this book and the articles
related to it. The following claims that we should. The primary reason
is not that Bourdieu is extensively read (and criticized) and that one
therefore has to read him.1 Nor is it that Bourdieu, who has Žnally begun
to direct his attention directly to the international (or global) economy,
has managed to say such novel and profound things about it that we
simply must integrate his thoughts. Rather, I will argue that his ‘frontal
attack on economics’ (p. 29) is useful for IPE scholars because it spells
out and demonstrates the application of an approach, which has the
virtue of sharing traditional concerns if IPE scholars with (1) empirical
economic reality as opposed to abstract modelling; and (2) with the struc-
tural power inherent in this reality. But, in addition to this, Bourdieu’s
approach lays more weight on (3) critical scholarship and above all reex-
ivity, than has so far been common in our subject. I want to suggest that
given the recent sociological turn of much international political economy
thinking, Bourdieu is essential reading, whether or not one agrees with
him.

Exploring economic reality to criticize economics

It is not fortuitous that empirical research takes up the bulk of all
Bourdieu’s work. Indeed, Bourdieu is extremely critical of work that is

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 LEA NDER: PIERRE BOURDIEU ON ECONOMICS

not empirical in its aims. He does not want to be seen as a ‘theorist’

doing the kind of ‘gobbledygook that goes for theory in much of the
Anglo-Saxon world’ (quoted in Jenkins, 1992: 67). He urges people to
read his empirical work. He dislikes scholastic discussions of theory and
theorists for their own sake (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). However,
Bourdieu is not opposed to ‘theory’ as such. Rather he is of the convic-
tion that ‘theory without empirical content is empty, but empirical
research without theory is blind’. His theoretical framework is devel-
oped to make sense of reality, and this is the important part. It is not
that he looks at reality primarily to conŽrm or check his theories. In fact,
if pushed he has no doubt that he prefers scholars who describe and
understand reality to those who do grand theorizing while assuming
that reality should Žt. In defense of Joe Bain’s work (an industrial econ-
omist accused of lack of rigorous theoretical grounding) Bourdieu writes:
‘In fact, it may be better to move in the right direction, with loose theo-
ries putting the accent on empirical analysis of industrial sectors, rather
than adopting the appearance of theoretical rigour and move into a blind
end in order to present an elegant and general analysis’ (p. 243, my
translation).
Consequently, in this book, Bourdieu is highly critical of the ‘scholastic
bias’ in economics (p. 22); that is the tendency to construct increasingly
abstract theories and econometric models. According to him and to many
who moved to IPE, these are developed without concern for reality. The
key aim is a parsimonious and general theorizing. The homo oeconom-
icus, as Bourdieu points out, is a sociological and political monster created
as scholars take their own theories about calculation and motivation to
be those in the conscience of the individuals they are looking at. They
commit a rather grotesque ‘scholastic fallacy’ (p. 256; also Bourdieu, 1997:
62). Moreover, the disrespect for empirical reality creates an ‘anti-genetic’
prejudice (p. 16). That is an assumption that both the economic Želd and
the actors within it (and for Gary Becker all Želds and all actors) have
always and everywhere functioned in a more or less unchanged fashion
that can be studied by the means of economic theory. Whether implic-
itly or explicitly, Bourdieu’s studies try to show the utter falsity of this
approach, as well as its political naivity. The sociologist Bourdieu goes
out to salvage economics from the economists.
It is therefore not altogether surprising that Bourdieu uses an empir-
ical study of a seemingly unimportant market, the (French) housing
market, to launch his ‘frontal attack on economics’. The bottom line of
the book is that economics cannot account for what goes on (or for
outcomes) in the housing market. The ‘house’ takes up an almost myth-
ical importance in social imagery and is a very important indicator of
status and values (pp. 34–40). Only with reference to this construction
can we comprehend why the petit bourgeois fails to behave as the homo
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oeconomicus of economic theory and instead ‘gets into projects which are
too big for him, because suited to his ambitions more than to his means’
(p. 223). Moreover, Bourdieu underlines that far from neutrally adjusting
supply and demand, markets themselves are a social process whereby
the disadvantaged tend to become even more disadvantaged:
The adjustment of supply and demand is not the result of the mirac-
ulous aggregation of innumerable miracles operated by rational
calculators capable of choosing according to their interests. Contrary
to appearances, there is nothing natural or self-evident in the fact
that the most deprived buyers Žnd themselves confronting the Žrms
offering outmoded products, especially aesthetically, whereas
others ‘spontaneously’ turn to Žrms which occupy positions homo-
logous to their own in the social space. . . . We are hence brought
to substitute the myth of the ‘invisible hand’, key to liberal
mythology, with the logic of spontaneous orchestration of practices,
grounded on a wide network of homologies.
(pp. 97–8, my translation)
Lastly, markets are political constructs and the housing market more so
than most other markets (p. 113). National ‘housing policies’ make the
market by deŽning the conditions of owning, renting, building and
selling housing via state aids for renting, buying, constructing, taxation,
changes, rules for technical quality, etc. In the book, Bourdieu shows
that this political market construction has not been neutral: from the
1960s onwards the policies have become more ‘liberal’, focused on owner-
ship (as opposed to the social right to housing). This has strengthened
the hand of the suppliers in many ways, but most signiŽcantly by shaping
individual preferences:
As the workers’ gardens in times past, the individual house, and
the long term credit opening access to it, should tie the ‘beneŽcia-
ries’ durably to an economic and social order which was itself the
guarantee of all guarantees.
(p. 149, my translation)
But local level housing policies have also tended to reinforce the disad-
vantage of buyers and in particular of the socially weaker ones. Indeed,
the ‘exibility’ in the implementation of rules has granted ‘local nota-
bles both the beneŽt of the rule and of the transgression’ (p. 171). This
has tended to play against the common subjects lacking resources and
contacts to bend the rules in their own favour (p. 171). The resulting
inequality between sellers and buyers produces a ‘contract under
constraint’ (title of ch. 4) where the only thing that really varies is ‘the
speed and brutality by which the seller imposes his control over the
transaction’ (p. 183). As this shows, understanding the housing market
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(and the symbolic violence suffered by the petit bourgeois in it, p. 223)
requires abandoning the basic assumption that economics is hermeti-
cally sealed off from the rest of social reality. Preferences, markets and
behaviour are all social constructions in time and place. Understanding
them requires serious attention to social reality.
This taking reality seriously is something that should make Bourdieu
attractive to at least some of the scholars in international political
economy. IPE was created as a reaction against scholasticism: on the one
hand the scholasticism of international relations which failed to take into
account the economic relations and, on the other hand, that of econo-
mists who refused to see that the international economy could not be
properly explained unless power relations among states were taken into
account (Strange, 1972). Similarly today, there is an acute sense among
IPE scholars that their empirical work (for example on globalization and
its effects) is of fundamental importance. They are dealing with impor-
tant, sometimes new, phenomena which existing theories exclude from
their Želd of vision but which are of fundamental importance for social
and political change. Therefore, theoretical openness and, above all,
interest in empirical research is a sine qua non if important portions of
this reality are not to be excluded (Palan, 2000).

Making structural power visible

Most important for Bourdieu is that disinterest in reality combined with
a scholastic penchant for deductive theorizing is likely to dissimulate
power relations. Much like classical IPE scholars (e.g. Strange, Gilpin,
Ruggie) one of the key criticisms Bourdieu makes of economists is that
they exclude the important part of what goes on in the economy by
assumption. They take the interests of the actors and conditions of their
interaction for granted. Yet it is precisely the formation of the rules of
the game, of interests and of identities that gives shape to social reality.
Ignoring this means obfuscating important questions of political domi-
nation, economic exploitation and symbolic violence. Although this point
is not exactly new for social and political theory (Lukes, 1974), or IR/IPE
(Guzzini, 1993), Bourdieu embeds his theory of Želds in a general frame-
work of social action.
This Želd theory is clearly a ‘structuralist’ attack on agency centred
explanations; in particular economics. Not by chance does Bourdieu
choose the provocative epigram ‘while economics is about how people
make choices, sociology is about how they don’t have any choice to
make’ for his book; in spite of the fact that, as he insists, he believes
that people have quite some scope for choosing. Bourdieu has no doubt
that the starting point of empirical research ought to be structure. His
study of the housing market begins by clarifying the (largely structurally
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derived) dispositions (habitus) of the consumers and the structure of the

Želd (the housing market).2 He then proceeds to look at the way in which
this Želd interacts with politics. He looks at how the state (local and
national) has ‘constructed the market’ (this is the title of ch. 2). It is only
once Bourdieu has gone by this rather long route that he can begin to
understand why contracts in the housing market look the way they do.
Looking at only the contract, and the interaction surrounding it, would
hide the ‘vérité structurale’ of the relationship between sellers and buyers.
Bourdieu is a rather ‘thick’ structuralist.3 He is very critical of
interactionist approaches in that he is convinced that the structure has
effects independently of the interaction of agents and even indepen-
dently of their consciousness. This is his key disagreement with thinner
versions of structuralism; ‘interactionist approaches’, which ‘embed’
economic interaction in social relations, e.g. Mark Granovetter, (p. 242,
and Bourdieu, 1997: 55). According to Bourdieu, these approaches can
only take into account parts of structural effects, which are the result of
interaction and which are consciously understood by the actors.
Granovetter’s point against Williamson is that he does not adequately
take into account the role of social structures in reducing risk for the
actors. It is not that social actors shape perceptions and identities and
behaviour. For Bourdieu this excludes important parts of, perhaps the
most important part, of power relations: those which are taken for
granted by the agents; those where power is exercised without interac-
tion, via the operation of structures; those relations whereby disposi-
tions, identities and interests are formed.4
However, at this point it is important to underline that being a ‘struc-
turalist’ and emphasizing structural power does not mean that agency
cannot be conceived of nor that power cannot be used and conceived
of at the agency level. In this book Bourdieu shows that there is consid-
erable scope for agency and strategic calculation. Actors do not slavishly
behave according to dispositions given by the social structure and their
Želd. Rather, the habitus is a collection of dispositions partly derived
from the structure but also partly from personal experience. The habitus
makes actors likely to behave in appropriate ways in view of their own
circumstances. It also saves them a great deal of trouble in thinking.
They simply know what is reasonable to do and what is reasonable to
expect in given circumstances. However, this does not exclude that
people have choices, make strategies, and try to mobilize whatever power
they have in their relations to others. In this book for instance, Bourdieu
analyses a variety of cunning strategies used by real estate agents to
impose themselves on the buyers (ch. 4, pp. 120–1 in particular). The
point is that if one focuses only on this, one misses the many power
effects, which take place without agency level interaction and are related
to the constitution of world views, identities, and values.
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The emphasis on the importance of power generated by structures

and on the fact that the economy is one part of social and political life
is something that is shared by most scholars in IPE. The link between
politics and economics and between states and private actors is at the
centre of our work. What this book can contribute to thinking on the
subject is a clear and elaborate theoretical framework for analysing these
links. What it does not contribute are elaborate arguments directly applic-
able to the Želd of IPE. The postscript on the move from a national to
an international economy and the attempt to generalize about the logic
of the economic Želd are the weakest parts of the book. In the Žrst,
Bourdieu justiŽably points to the increasing polarization largely due to
structural effects, the ideological and prescriptive dimensions of
gloablization and the reorganizations of the economic role of the state.
However, there is little analysis and no reference to the, already well-
developed debate and thinking on the subject. Similarly, in blatant
contrast to the general argument, and to the analysis of the housing
sector, Bourdieu makes general statements about the importance of things
like size, Žrm age (which he equates with its symbolic capital), tech-
nology, or relations to the state for Žrms without allowing for variations
among sectors, regions or countries (pp. 246 ff; Bourdieu, 1997: 56 ff).

The importance of critical and reexive thinking

A Žnal good reason to take Bourdieu’s work on the economy seriously
is his emphasis on the importance of critical and reexive thinking in
academia. Like many writers in the IPE tradition (e.g. Cox and Sinclair:
1996; Strange: 1998), Bourdieu considers it one of the key tasks and
responsibilities of academics to analyse social reality critically. That is,
he believes that it is not only their task to describe what it is, but also
to explore usually taken for granted aspects of this reality and be crit-
ical of the way that social and political life systematically creates winners
and losers. And although this engagement in political debates has
brought him considerable criticism (Verdes-Leroux: 2000). I would argue
that since it is done openly and reexively, it is something that we as
international political economy scholars could draw inspiration from.
Indeed, Bourdieu’s concern with critical thinking combined with his
interest in reality have drawn him into the political debate and at present
into the debates closest to international political economy, namely those
surrounding globalization and the spread of neo-liberalism. Bourdieu is
obviously very critical of the spread of neo-liberalism. He sees neo-liber-
alism as based in a free-trade credo which delegitimizes political debate
and interventionist economic policies. Fundamentally, the price of
economic liberty is the threat of unemployment and generalized inse-
curity which is a form of structural violence on all levels of the social
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hierarchy (Bourdieu, 1998). This analysis leads him in two directions:

one is the critique of economic liberalism, of which the book under
review here is a prime illustration. The other direction is an exploration
of reasons for the spread of neo-liberalism.
Bourdieu sees the spread of neo-liberalism as a part of the spread of
a more general ‘new planetary vulgata’ of US-American origin (Bordieu,
2000). Along with neo-liberalism and globalization, Bourdieu includes
multiculturalism, minority, identity, underclass, communitarianism, and
postmodernism in this vulgata.5 Bourdieu, often unjustly, argues that
this vulgata frames academic and political debate in such a way as to
exclude references to speciŽc structures, power relations and conicts.
Bourdieu’s explanation of this development is dual. He insists on the
dominance of US cultural and intellectual life (Bourdieu and Wacquant,
1998: 113). Foundations and think tanks of US origin Žnance research.
US media dominates information. But Bourdieu also insists on the recei-
ving end. That is on the importance of the fact that the Želds where
knowledge and politics are produced have been restructured as a conse-
quence of this dominance. This changing structure has opened the way
for new individual ‘strategies’ and explains why many European and
French academics and journalists make the ‘planetary vulgata’ their own
(Bourdieu, 1998 and 1999a). This in turn explains why social democratic
policy-makers decide to implement exploitation programmes instead of
defending social democratic values (Bourdieu, 1999).
Bourdieu’s analysis of what IR/IPE scholars would usually term ‘norm
diffusion’ and construction of ‘epistemic communities’ is an interesting
alternative to the concurrently dominant approaches (Checkel, 1997;
Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998). Bourdieu looks at the power relations
(structurally conceived) which make actors adopt some norms and not
others. That is, he departs from the structural level, rather than level of
the actor. He also looks at the interaction among actors in the epistemic
community, but sees it as the expression of, rather than the cause of,
norm spread. This allows him to provide an explanation for individual
actors’ choices and to propose a reasoning (based on power relations),
as to why certain norms and ideas, and not others, spread.
As the above illustrates, Bourdieu advocates not only critical thinking
but also reexivity. One kind of reexivity is already widely present in
our subject: a reexivity about the role of academics in shaping and
perpetuating discourses. That is an awareness of the fact that the (acad-
emic) observer is not a neutral outsider whose actions are without conse-
quence for object of study.6 However, there is a second dimension to
this reexivity and that is the more narrow reexivity about the bias
brought into the study by the position of the academic. That is the aware-
ness that observers inuence the object of study by their analysis; but
moreover the understanding of the object is affected by the observer’s
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own understanding of the world, which for Bourdieu is largely derived

from the position in a speciŽc social structure in a speciŽc time and
place. This is an issue anthropologists have dealt with more consistently
than others. But Bourdieu is persistently arguing that the problem is not
limited to the anthropologist trying to understand Zande (or some other)
culture, but should be kept in mind also when analysing the own social
reality, including the economy. Thus, the last chapter of the book under
review bears the title ‘principles of an economic anthropology’.. Although
Bourdieu may well be criticized for not being sufŽciently reexive about
the bias in his own rendering of ‘objective reality’, much of his work is
certainly designed to lay out the logic of that bias as well as to stimu-
late public reection on academic bias and its origins more generally (in
particular Bourdieu, 1984). He believes that his open political engage-
ment may be preferable to a pretence of neutrality. An open political
engagement (lack of neutrality) may not be incompatible with impar-
tiality when it comes to analysing data from the social world. It may
even make any bias easier to unmask.
In short, this review has argued that although ‘les structures sociales
de l’économie’ is to a large extent about the housing market in France,
it – and the work surrounding it – could provide a useful reading for
IPE scholars. There is not only a case for, but actually an application of,
a method where empirical analysis is at the centre. There is a biting
critique of the neglect of power relations, and speciŽcally structural
power relations, in classical and neo-liberal economics. And Žnally there
is a salutary stress on the importance of reexivity. All of these advan-
tages make up for the weakness of the analysis of the international
economic Želd and the rather unhappy attempt to generalize about the
economic Želd (pp. 244–56). On these issues most IPE scholars will prob-
ably Žnd their own literature richer and more informed than the book
reviewed here.
Anna Leander
Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, Denmark

Notes
1 For an indication of the cult of the personality that has developed around
Bourdieu and his writings, I recommend a visit of the following website:
http://www.homme_moderne,org/societe/socio/bourdieu/index.4.html or
a simple search on the Internet.
2 This review essay would take grotesque proportions if I tried to discuss the
concepts of habitus, Želd and strategy in detail. For those unfamiliar with
them I would recommend Bourdieu’s own work (starting with the book
under review here). But there is also a wealth of secondary sources, including
e.g. Brubaker, 1985.
3 Bourdieu refuses to be identiŽed as a structuralist. He believes that he has
found a middle ground between structure and agency. Without going into
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the debate about whether or not this is the case, the reason for calling him
a ‘thick’ structuralist here is that he takes structure as the point of depart-
ure for his analysis and that this is a fundamental part of his critique of
liberal economics.
4 For an application of Bourdieu’s understanding of power in international
relations/international political economy, exempliŽed by a study of the
second gulf war, see Guzzini, 1994: ch. 11 in particular. For a more general
argument around the importance of using power sensitive sociological
approaches in IPE, see Leander, 1999.
5 An interesting and more detailed analysis of the transformation of the
economic Želd in France is (Lebaron, 1997).
6 Clearly Bourdieu does not believe that academics can somehow change the
world of their own accord. On the contrary, one of his critiques of multi-
culturalism is precisely that it obfuscates that the real issue is not recogni-
tion of minority cultures but a distribution of resources (Bourdieu, 2000). He
makes a similar argument in his call for a European Social Movement where
the issue is again distribution of resources not academic critiques of neo-
liberalism (Bourdieu, 1999).

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