Review

Author(s): Michael W. Apple

Review by: Michael W. Apple
Source: Comparative Education Review, Vol. 42, No. 2 (May, 1998), pp. 228-230
Published by: University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Comparative and International
Education Society
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 BOOKREVIEWS

or separate individuals from each other. Here, educators could rework the narrative
codes of everyday life to make explicit the alternating and contradictory modes of
subject formation that characterize postmodern, postindustrial society.
Social Cartographyis an ambitious, important, and timely collection that will be
of considerable interest to educators, cultural workers, and critical social theorists
alike.

PETER L. McLAREN
Universityof California,LosAngeles
RICKY LEE ALLEN
Universityof California,LosAngeles

TheStateNobility:EliteSchoolsin theFieldofPowerby Pierre Bourdieu. Stanford, Calif.:

Stanford University Press, 1996. 475 pp.
Pierre Bourdieu is among the most prolific sociologists concerned with the intersec-
tion of culture, economy, and the state in the world. Each year seems to bring a new
translation of books that have appeared earlier in France. The State Nobility,trans-
lated elegantly by Lauretta Clough, originally appeared in 1989. In it, Bourdieu
both extends and deepens his analysis of the relationship among education, privi-
lege, and power.
Like a good deal of his work, The State Nobilityis expressly and determinedly
empirical. This is significant in a number of ways.First, even though it is very critical
of the ways in which dominant classes reproduce themselves through elite school-
ing, it does not simply assert this. Rather, it intricately documents how this occurs over
time. This leads to my second point. Even though the book is socially critical, it never
degenerates into the sloganized stylisticsthat frequently characterize the supposedly
critical literature in education that centers around the sometimes vulgar and not
very nuanced appropriations of some parts of postmodernism into education and
that characterize even larger parts of the material on "critical pedagogy." Unlike
too many of these authors, while Bourdieu's texts are difficult at times, they are defi-
nitely worth the effort of reading them carefully and unpacking their meaning.
TheStateNobilityis specifically French. Because of this, while not imperative, it
would be useful for the reader to have read the somewhat more general analysis
found in one of Bourdieu's earlier books, Distinction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1984). The State Nobilityextends the arguments made there and
goes into much more detail about the structures of elite schooling and their com-
plex comparative connections within the field of social power in which they operate.
Even though the volume focuses on elite education in France, it proves to be excep-
tionally helpful in thinking about other nations. Indeed, I would go so far as to say
that if we were to make a small list of those authors whose work is essential for
comparative research, Bourdieu's name should be at or near the top.
All of Bourdieu's writing provides cogent examples of what has been called "re-

228 May1998

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 BOOK REVIEWS

lational analysis." He demonstrates in quite nuanced ways the workings of multiple

fields of power and the multiple relations within and among fields of power. For
Bourdieu, as fields of power become more varied and more complex, so too do
the kinds of capital that dominate these fields. In the case of TheStateNobility,his
focus is on the relationship between economic capital and symbolic capital, on the
struggles between them, and on how such struggles are represented in the connec-
tions between elite education and forms of class domination and reproduction.
Bourdieu is not afraid to use the latter word-reproduction-and is clear about
when and how it can be used appropriately.
In the process, he demonstrates how academic titles function as "state magic."
In his terms, "the state [acts] as a public treasuryof material and symbolic resources
guaranteeing private appropriations" (p. 377). The ways in which elite schooling
not only supports this but also is constitutive of it is part of the story he wishes to
tell. He documents both the place that the most prestigious French educational
institutions hold in the creation of agents with the "appropriate" symbolic and ma-
terial capital and "appropriate" habitus and the position of these institutions in the
wider field of symbolic and material power.
Of course, as soon as I write these sentences I feel the need to deconstruct them.
Bourdieu is not easy to summarize in something like the above paragraph. This is
not because his language and arguments are sometimes complicated and dense-
which they are. Rather, it is because nearly all of Bourdieu's corpus of work is ex-
tremely ambitious in terms of its larger project and its arguments with other proj-
ects. Further, like all of his work, TheStateNobilityis filled with insights that take the
form of something like "asides" to the reader-comments and criticisms of other
theories and empirical work either directly or tangentially connected to the subject
with which he is dealing. Thus, within this volume, almost in passing, there are co-
gent insights on what is wrong with well-known work in social stratification research,
in human capital theory, in those variants of Marxist analysis that are still grounded
in essentializing logics, in postmodernism's discussions of "reason," and so on. At
the same time, Bourdieu provides insights into what needs to be done to correct
these weaknesses and overstatements. Since parts of Bourdieu have been appropri-
ated by some postmodernist critiques of "reason" within education, it would be
more than a little useful, for example, if they were to read his concluding remarks
in this book.
I do not mean to imply that Bourdieu's investigations and arguments are flaw-
less. Even though I have considerable respect for him conceptually and empirically,
there are weaknesses in his work, some of which I have suggested in Educationand
Power(2d ed., New York: Routledge, 1995). For example, in general there are lim-
its to how literally we would want to take his metaphors of markets and capital. In
addition, many of his arguments are grounded in a logic of what he calls "structural
homologies" between institutions and fields. Thus, too often he smuggles in corre-
spondence principles that may be weaker than they first appear. At the very least,
arguments by "homology" need to be used cautiously. Further, while he does in-
clude some limited material on gender in his analysis, he may significantly under-
play the relatively autonomous ways in which relations of gender and race constitute
and reconstitute fields of power that are seemingly class based.

Comparative Education Review 229

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 BOOK REVIEWS

Finally, even given his synthetic grasp of a large amount of international litera-
ture, there are times when the gaps in his references yawn wide. An important in-
stance of this can readily be found in his interesting Durkheimian discussion of the
changes from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity in relations among com-
panies in the economy. As Bourdieu indicates, the implications of this transforma-
tion in terms of credentialling and the relative weight of specific kinds of schooling
in the social field of power are important. Yet, much of this is similar to Basil Bern-
stein's insightful and lengthy discussions of the transformations of such forms of
solidarity and of their implications for the formation of identities, institutions, and
"legitimate" knowledge. I was puzzled and disappointed that Bourdieu did not draw
on Bernstein's work here.
However, while such criticisms should not be taken lightly, there is still so much
power (forgive the play on words here) in Bourdieu's analyses that he is alwaysworth
reading carefully, and this book is no exception. Yet, there is another part of The
StateNobilitythat I need to mention. LoicJ. D. Wacquant's "Foreword"to the volume
is cogent and does a fine job of outlining Bourdieu's general arguments and what is
at stake in them.

MICHAEL W. APPLE

John BascomProfessor
Universityof Wisconsin,Madison

Learning:.-The TreasureWithin:Reportto Unescoof theInternationalCommissionon Edu-

cationfor the Twenty-First
Centuryby Jacques Delors et al. Paris: Unesco Publish-
ing, 1996. 266 pp.
Those who choose to write about a century of education face a difficult task. Much
can happen in 100 years. Should the author describe the beginning of the period
or its end or attempt sweeping generalizations that cover the entire span? Should
the emphasis be on what will happen or what should and could be made to happen?
These issues may have been addressed by the authors of the Reportto Unescoof
theInternationalCommissionon Educationfor the Twenty-First Century.The commission,
organized in 1993 byJacques Delors for Unesco, included 14 leading world public
figures, held eight working sessions in all the continents and consulted with a wide
range of government and private groups, including educators and social scientists.
The commission sought to discuss education in all its diversity. Not clear, however,
is whether the title of the report refers to the dawning of the twenty-firstcentury or
to the entire period.
The content of Learning:.-The TreasureWithinsuggests that this report is about
education in the next 10 or 15 years but not the twenty-firstcentury in its entirety.
The value of the report lies, therefore, in what it suggests about immediate educa-
tional reforms rather than long-term trends, possibilities, or strategies. Although it
cites many illustrative cases, the argument is essentially normative rather than em-

230 May 1998

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