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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
The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique
of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for
new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx,
Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with
Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as
Assistant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions,
reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published in
other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political per-
spectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas,
producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse
and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre of
Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th
centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary
issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.
 Gabriella Paolucci
Editor

Bourdieu and Marx

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

ISSN 2524-7123     ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
ISBN 978-3-031-06288-9    ISBN 978-3-031-06289-6 (eBook)
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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

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Bourdieu, P. 2008 [2002]. The Bachelor’s Ball: The Crisis of Peasant Society in
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Croce, M. 2015. The Habitus and the Critique of the Present: A Wittgensteinian
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Toscano, Alberto, and Jamie Woodcock. 2015. Spectres of Marxism: A Comment

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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

18
On this theme, see also the highly stimulating analysis offered by Bruno Karsenti (2013).
Another random document with
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 to receive gifts or testimonials because of any special work of
relief in which they have taken part. Therefore, should the
plan of his majesty’s government to present to me some
testimonial be as yet not so advanced as to cause any
embarrassment if not carried out, I would be glad to have it
held in abeyance until the question is decided.
But as there exists no regulation of this nature at present, if
this plan has been so advanced that my not receiving this
testimonial would cause any embarrassment to his majesty’s
government, or to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, please take
no action in the matter.
Permit me to again express to your excellency my sincere
appreciation, and to say whatever should be decided I shall
always value the intention of such kindly recognition of the
American Red Cross and its work on the part of the Italian
government.
Please accept, Mr. Ambassador, the expression of my
highest esteem and my heartiest good wishes for the return of
prosperity to Sicily and Calabria.
Yours, sincerely,
MABEL T. BOARDMAN.

To this letter the Ambassador replied that the testimonial had

already been completed, and he begged that no action against its
acceptance be taken.
 THE ELIZABETH GRISCOM HOSPITAL AT VILLAGIO DE REGINA ELENA. IN
PROCESS OF CONSTRUCTION.

A beautiful reproduction in yellow gold of the ancient civic crown of

Rome, sent in a most artistic leather jewel case, was later presented
to Miss Boardman, in the name of the Italian government, by the
Marquis Montagliari, the Italian Charge d’Affairs, in the absence of
the Ambassador. On a plate in the case is engraved:
To Miss Mabel Boardman
Of the American Red Cross Society.
The Italian Government as a Token of Gratitude.
1908-1909.
A translation of the graceful letter of the Minister of Foreign Affairs,
Signor Tittoni, which accompanied the gift, is given below:

Rome, June 16, 1909.

Illustrious Lady: The royal Ambassador has already
expressed, and will reiterate, to you the sentiments of our
gratitude for the highly generous work inspired by you, and
accomplished with such intelligent love, during the terrible
disaster which overwhelmed our country at the end of the last
year.
Now I desire to address you personally, offering to you, in
the name of the government and the Italian people, an object
which is inspired by our artistic traditions, and which will serve
to recall to you the benefactions rendered and the memory
which we preserve thereof.
We have wished to see in the action, so prompt, so
efficacious, so vast, and so enduring of the American Red
Cross, something more than a simple evidence of human
fraternity. We love to consider it a fresh proof of the spiritual
ties by which the United States feel themselves bound to the
Mother Italy; therefore this action has been doubly dear to us.
To you belongs so large a share of the merit, allow us to see
personified in yourself all the feminine grace of the institution
which has known how to give expression to these ties in the
form most acceptable to the grateful beneficiaries.
With the most cordial regards, yours, most devotedly,
TITTONI.

Your Excellency: Permit me to express, through you, to

the Italian government and to the people of Italy my most
profound appreciation of the honor conferred upon me by the
presentation of the beautiful reproduction of the civic crown of
Rome, as a token of gratitude for the sympathy and
assistance of the American Red Cross after the terrible
disaster in Sicily and Calabria.
It was with a sense of the greatest sorrow and the sincerest
sympathy that the people of the United States, through their
Red Cross Society, found means to express in tangible form
these heartfelt emotions. To many of our people Italy is the
motherland, and to many others she has given so rich a
treasury of art and literature that we must remain forever in
her debt. Stricken by one of the great and mysterious forces
of nature, thousands of her people were destroyed and
 thousands were left homeless, suffering, and in dire distress.
Our people, overwhelmed by her misfortune, were glad, in the
spirit of brotherly love, to take some share in her assistance.
That the Italian government selected as a token of gratitude
an object around which clusters the great traditions of ancient
Rome moves us deeply, and will be an inspiration for our Red
Cross to continue constant in its efforts to conquer suffering
and be worthy of such recognition.
Permit me to express my own gratitude, and to say that
what little I have been able to do personally has been done
with sincere affection for Italy and her people, and because of
the sympathetic and hearty support of our people and Red
Cross officers.
With earnest wishes for the prosperity of your country, and
for the speedy rehabilitation of the stricken communities, and
with cordial regards and many thanks for your excellency’s
most kind communication, I am
Yours, sincerely,
MABEL T. BOARDMAN.
Senator Tittoni,
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rome, Italy.

On June 10, 1909, the Executive Committee adopted the following

resolution:

Whereas, It has sometimes occurred that members of the

American Red Cross, engaged in some special work, have
been presented with gifts because of appreciation of this
work; and,
Whereas, The Executive Committee of the American Red
Cross considers that this is an unwise custom to permit to
continue; and,
 Whereas, The American Red Cross itself provides a medal
of merit for recognition of especially meritorious relief work;
Be it resolved, That hereafter no member of the American
Red Cross shall be permitted to receive any valuable gift in
recognition of special relief work in which he or she has taken
part, and that no testimonial or medal shall be accepted
without authority of the Executive Committee.
PORTUGUESE EARTHQUAKE RELIEF

Lisbon, Portugal, August 5, 1909.

The American National Red Cross, Washington, D. C.
Gentlemen: Through His Excellency, Colonel Page Bryan,
American Minister at Lisbon, we have just received your new
contribution of $300 for our Earthquake Relief Fund, your credit on
that account having thus risen to $1,300.
We beg to present to you our earnest thanks for this generous
manifestation of your sympathy and take the liberty of enclosing a
photo showing the design of the houses you kindly have aided us to
build for 160 families of the poorest classes in the four villages
destroyed by the earthquake.
Very faithfully, yours,
PELA SOCIEDADE PORTUGUEZA DA CRUZ VERMELHA,
G. L. Santos Ferreira, Secretary.
 CANAL ZONE RED CROSS
By Major C. A. Devol, U. S. Army.
Of the three great classes of Red Cross work, war relief,
international relief and emergency relief, the last is the field in which
the Canal Zone Branch is making itself peculiarly useful.

PRESIDENT TAFT ADDRESSING AUDIENCE OF RED

CROSS MEMBERS AT THE Y. M. C. A., CULEBRA.
 On the Canal Zone there is less need of such an organization in
some ways than there would be in a community of 50,000 people in
the United States, because here the government, through the
Isthmian Canal Commission, maintains a good system of hospitals
and district physicians, and also because there are few people here
who cannot work, and almost none who cannot get work if they want
it. But there is a limit beyond which the Commission may not go in
the expenditure of government funds, and, broadly, that limit is that it
may not aid people who are not employed on the Canal work. To the
cases that lie outside this limit the Red Cross addresses itself.

VIEW OF HOSPITAL GROUNDS FROM ENTRANCE, ANCON.

 WRECK OF STEAM SHOVEL NO. 261. BAS OBISPO, DECEMBER 12, 1908.

An instance arose recently in Colon, where a family was destitute

because it had been deserted by the husband and father. The
mother and three children were kept alive by private subscription
until the Red Cross was organized. The Red Cross then sent the
family to New York, where the members of the Masonic order came
to their relief and sent them to the mother’s home in England. The
Commission could not help in such a case, but the Red Cross could,
and did.
A citizen of France, living near Tabernilla, and not employed on the
Canal work, was bitten by a mad dog a few weeks ago. He had no
money to pay his way to a Pasteur Institute; attempts to inoculate for
hydrophobia on the Isthmus have been of uncertain value, and the
Commission could not send a non-employee to the United States.
The Red Cross appropriated $50 for his steamship fare to New York
and he was successfully treated in the Pasteur Institute in that city.
 CULEBRA CUT. LOOKING SOUTH. FEBRUARY, 1905.

A Spanish laborer who had lost both his legs on the Isthmus was
sent to New York by the Commission, where he was fitted with two
cork legs and then sent back to his home in Spain. The Red Cross
gave him $50 to help him on his way, for the Commission could not
advance more than his actual transportation and medical fees.
Not long ago a Boer, who had become naturalized as an
American, was declared so far gone with tuberculosis that he could
not work on the Isthmus nor remain here with safety. He had been in
Mexico a few years before, and felt sure that if he could return to the
plateau region his health would be restored. The Red Cross
advanced him $150 to defray his expenses—in other words, gave
him another chance for his life.
A number of cases have been relieved where the necessity was
just as pressing but where a smaller amount was sufficient.
It is not improbable that there may be a call for immediate relief on
a larger scale before the Canal is completed and the Americans in
this big construction camp pass on to other work. If an accident
occurs, it will find a thorough organization with funds in hand and
ready to begin work without any preliminaries.
Lectures on first aid are delivered by the district physicians along
the line of the Canal to members of the police and fire departments.
To what extent this instruction will aid in time of emergency is
conjectural, but it should have the effect of adding instructed men to
the corps of nurses and doctors in case of a big accident. It is
probable, however, that there is no place on earth where the hospital
corps is so well equipped to give prompt aid as on the Canal Zone.
On this account, the instruction of the police and firemen is not likely
to prove such a benefit as it would in a less thoroughly organized
community.

GATUN DAM SITE. LOOKING EAST FROM SPILLWAY. AUGUST, 1908.

The Canal Zone Branch has already spent about $500 in its relief
work, and its balance on July 1, 1909, was $1,577.17.
The suggestion that a branch of the American National Red Cross
be organized on the Canal Zone was made by Miss Mabel T.
Boardman, member of the Executive Committee, to Major C. A.
Devol, U. S. A., Chief Quartermaster of the Isthmian Canal
Commission, in a letter dated October 26, 1908. At the request of
Major Devol, Major Lynch, of the Medical Department, U. S. A.,
author of the text-book, “How to Prevent Accidents and What to Do
for Injuries and Emergencies,” came to the Isthmus in January, 1909,
and addressed Red Cross meetings at Ancon, Culebra, Gorgona
and Cristobal. Major Devol accompanied Major Lynch, and invited all
persons interested to help organize a Canal Zone Branch. On
January 17, at a meeting held in the Hotel Tivoli, at Ancon, a
permanent organization was effected, with Major C. A. Devol as
president; Mr H. D. Reed, treasurer; Miss J. Macklin Beattie,
secretary. The Canal Zone was divided into fourteen districts, and
the work of perfecting district organizations was begun. At a meeting
held in the Hotel Tivoli, February 28, twelve district organizations
were represented. The central organization was perfected by
electing Mrs. Lorin C. Collins, Lieutenant-Colonel John L. Phillips,
Major Chester Harding, and Mr. A. Bruce Minear an executive
committee; and Mr. W. W. Warwick, auditor. A Committee on First
Aid Lectures was appointed, consisting of Lieutenant-Colonel Phillips
and Mr. H. D. Reed.
A noteworthy event in the early history of the Canal Zone Branch
was the visit of President-elect Taft, National President of the Red
Cross, to the Canal Zone in February, 1909. On the night of
February 3 he made an address at the Commission Club house in
Culebra, in which he outlined the work of the Red Cross. The
meeting was attended by over 1,200 members of the Red Cross,
and had a marked effect in arousing popular interest in this most
important work.
The Canal Zone has now a membership of 1,300, divided among
fourteen districts. The following are the officers of the district
organizations:

Ancon—Dr. John L. Phillips, chairman.

Corozal—Alfred P. James, chairman.
Pedro Miguel—Ernest Bitely, chairman.
Paraiso—Harry Dundas, chairman.
Culebra—Mrs. C. A. Devol, chairman.
Gatun—Major William L. Sibert, chairman.
Cristobal—Dr. M. E. Connor, chairman.
Empire—W. M. Wood, acting chairman.
Las Cascadas—Mrs. Frank I. McAllister, acting chairman.
Bas Obispo—X. D. Holt, acting chairman.
Camp Elliott—Mrs. B. F. Fuller, acting chairman.
Gorgona—Mrs. Frank M. Morrison, acting chairman.
San Pablo—V. L. Kearney, acting chairman.
Tabernilla—C. D. Thaxton, acting chairman.
 THE USE AND ABUSE OF THE RED
CROSS BRASSARD
By G. H. Richardson, M. D.,
Late First Lieutenant Medical Reserve Corps, U. S.
A.
In a War Department order issued on February 10, 1909, the
importance of regulating the issue of brassards to those entitled to
neutrality by virtue of the first paragraph of article 9, and articles 10
and 11 of the Geneva Convention, was recognized. At the same
time, and by the same order, the Medical Department was
authorized to provide and deliver the “necessary certificates of
identity to those persons attached to the sanitary service who do not
have a military uniform.”
It is generally understood that this order shall not be applicable in
time of peace; yet it would seem that, to make it effective and to
anticipate the confusion incident to a declaration of war, some plan
or system should be developed in the American Red Cross (which is
the sanitary service recognized by the War Department) whereby the
individual members could be definitely classified, and, when the
occasion demanded, the necessary brassards and cards of identity
could be expeditiously given them.
That this question should engage the attention of the American
Red Cross is apparent to those of us who were in San Francisco
during the weeks immediately following the disaster of April 18,
1906. On almost every other man was seen the Red Cross emblem
in some form, it being generally known that those engaged in duties
pertaining to this organization were permitted to pass and re-pass
the sentries on duty in different parts of the city; for while we were
not technically “under martial law,” yet the streets were everywhere
patrolled by armed men, some of whom were directly under military
control and others only partially so. It was in passing one of these
patrols that a personal friend of mine was shot and killed for refusing,
when challenged, to stop his automobile, on which was flying a Red
Cross flag. It is needless to say that not one-quarter of those using
the emblem were legally entitled to do so, and much harm was done
the organization by those who wore the brassard for personal gain
and benefit.
Only by the study of past experience can we judge what the future
will produce; and if we expect the general public ever to recognize
and respect the brassard we should begin at once a campaign of
instruction which will explain its legitimate use and the reasons for
regulating its issue.
It would be of incalculable benefit in time of war, or when martial
law was declared, to have brassards and cards of identification
already issued and recorded, for they could readily be re-stamped or
copied by the Medical Department, as provided for in the order
quoted, with the result that much time would be saved and much
confusion avoided.
REPRESSION OF THE ABUSE OF THE
RED CROSS INSIGNIA
At the time of the Eighth International Red Cross Conference held
in London, June, 1907, Professor Louis Renault presented in the
name of the Central Committee of the French Red Cross a report
upon the “Repression of the Abuse of the Red Cross Insignia.” In this
report Professor Renault showed that for twenty years this question
had not ceased to be considered. This abuse continues in certain
countries—ours among the number—because of insufficient
legislation. Still, important steps have been taken, and if to-day the
work has not been completed it is on the right road. At the
International Convention of 1906, at Geneva, when the revised treaty
was accepted it contained special paragraphs referring to the
protection of the insignia and name which all the countries of the
world have agreed upon to designate the hospital formations and
their personnel protected by this treaty. The countries signing this
treaty obligated themselves, in case their present laws do not
provide sufficient protection to the Red Cross name and insignia, to
apply to their respective legislative bodies for the further necessary
legislation. The report of Professor Renault had for its object to call
attention to these promises that had been made. The honor and the
interest of each country demand that they be kept. The Swiss
Federal Council has lately prepared a law which it will present to the
Chambers to preserve to this emblem of humanitarian neutrality,
which the Cross of Geneva represents, all its moral value and its
noble signification.

Action of American Medical Association.

Major W. M. Ireland, Medical Corps, U. S. Army, presented to the
House of Delegates of the American Medical Association the
resolution adopted by the Executive Committee of the American
National Red Cross, October 18, 1907, and then offered the
following resolution:

Whereas, By the terms of the Treaty of Geneva, 1864, and

the Revised Treaty of Geneva, 1906, the emblem of the
Greek Red Cross on a white ground, and the words “Red
Cross,” or “Geneva Cross,” were adopted to designate the
personnel and materiel of the medical departments of the
military and naval forces and of the recognized volunteer aid
societies in time of war for the humane purpose of rendering
them immune from attack or capture; and
Whereas, The United States, as well as all other civilized
powers, is a signatory to said treaties; and
Whereas, The use of the Red Cross by medical
associations and individuals of the medical profession must
seriously impair the usefulness of the emblem for the purpose
for which it was created and adopted; be it therefore
Resolved, That it is the sense of the American Medical
Association that the use of the Geneva Red Cross by
associations or individuals, other than those of the army, navy
and Red Cross Society, should be discontinued, and, if
desirable, some other insignia adopted, and be it further
Resolved, That the adoption of this resolution be given as
wide publicity as possible in the medical journals of the
country.
Dr. Samuel Wolfe, of Pennsylvania, supplemented the
resolutions presented by Major Ireland by introducing the
following preambles and resolution, which were also referred
to the Reference Committee on Legislation and Political
Action:
Whereas, It is held that the Red Cross, which now
constitutes the main character in the official badge of the
American Medical Association, is eminently distinctive of
 certain broader fields of philanthropy, rather than of medicine
in particular, and
Whereas, The traditions of medicine would be fully
satisfied by the adoption of a design as herewith submitted
and described as follows:
A shield on which is emblazoned the American eagle
holding in its talons a laurel wreath within which is the knotty
rod and entwined serpent and the letters A. M. A.; therefore,
be it
Resolved, That the American Medical Association adopt as
its official insignia or badge this design.
Protect the Red Cross.
Issued by the New York State Branch.

When the Red Cross insignia was first adopted at the Geneva
Convention, as a sign of a hospital in war, and for many years after
that, no one dreamed of using it as a mark on goods sold in trade.
Gradually, however, such use became more common, and a badge
of humanity, which men in the midst of warfare respected, became
more and more, in trade, a meaningless label, applied to all kinds of
medicinal boxes, bottles and jars, and every other conceivable
package and bundle.
The badge of the Red Cross in America would have become a
mere commercial mark but for the efforts of the American Red Cross
and its branches.
We have worked hard to stop this wrongful use of the red cross,
and we appeal to you to help us in this work, and to respect the law,
for the unauthorized use of the red cross is in violation of a Federal
statute. Help us to make the red cross what it should be, the badge
which stands for humanity, and help to those who suffer in war and
in calamities of all kinds. Help us to do this by stopping the use of the
red cross or using the words red cross on your own articles of
commerce and by urging others to do the same.
 Even if it helps you to sell a few articles by using this mark on
them, is it worth while bringing the red cross into the domain of
commercialism, when so many thousand Americans, men and
women, in private and in public life—President Taft as well as the
smallest worker in the smallest branch—are trying to make the red
cross the emblem of the great Red Cross work all over this country,
and of that work only?
We forget only too readily what is done in such cases as the San
Francisco and the Messina earthquakes, and few recall now the Red
Cross work in the Spanish War—fewer still the similar work of the
Sanitary Commissions during the Civil War. We pour out money to
the associations organized to help those in distress, and we give the
Red Cross millions of dollars to distribute. Nobody questions its
work; nobody doubts its efficiency; all trust it. Why not then help it as
we ask you to do? City officials in New York, and hundreds of
individuals have stopped the use of the red cross on ambulances,
automobiles, wagons, boxes, packages and all kinds of other
articles. They have chosen other emblems suggesting medicine and
purity of the articles sold. We urge you to do the same.
Help us, therefore, to make its badge honored and respected, so
that it shall stand for nothing but the presence of the ever-ready
American Red Cross.

Resolution adopted by the National Association of Retail

Druggists in convention at Louisville, September 6-10, 1909.
Whereas, By the terms of the Treaty of Geneva, 1864, and
the revised Treaty of Geneva, 1906, the emblem of the Greek
Red Cross on a white background and the words “Red Cross”
or “Geneva Cross” were adopted to designate the personnel
and materiel of the medical departments of the military and
naval forces and the recognized volunteer aid societies in
time of war, for the humane purpose of rendering them
immune from attack or capture, and
Whereas, The United States, as well as all other civilized
powers, is a signatory to said treaties,