Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals by David L. Swartz

Author:David L. Swartz [Swartz, David L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sociology
ISBN: 9780226925028
Google: 9-zTpNEaNowC
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 19045717
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

Critical Sociologist and Public Intellectual

On December 12, 1995, Pierre Bourdieu took up a megaphone and addressed striking railroad employees at the Lyon train station rally, culminating in the largest street demonstrations in Paris since May 1968.1 He proclaimed solidarity of French intellectuals with the striking workers. This intervention was the first of a series of highly visible public positions Bourdieu would take against neoliberalism and in support of the welfare state that would make him a key figure in the antiglobalization movement in the 1990s. By the mid-1990s, and until his death in 2002, the French sociologist had become the leading public intellectual in Europe.

Bourdieu (along with Jean-Claude Passeron) had achieved some fame already in the mid-sixties with the publication of The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture followed by Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture in 1970 (see Bourdieu and Passeron 1977, 1979). Yet these widely influential works did not lead Bourdieu to assume an active public intellectual role typical of so many French intellectuals. He rarely signed petitions, editorialized in newspapers, or participated in public demonstrations. In fact, his later years of public political activism seem to contrast with the earlier years of following a professional career as a social scientific researcher. Indeed Bourdieu’s relative silence during the May 1968 student uprising was conspicuous for virtually all other leading French sociologists at the time took public positions regarding the student movement.2 But in the 1990s Bourdieu clearly became a kind of public intellectual that he had not been before. A change occurred in both form and frequency of his political activism; he increasingly undertook a series of highly visible political engagements, whereas he previously had been quite critical of these forms of political activism by French intellectuals, notably of the “total intellectual” figure represented by Jean-Paul Sartre.3 Bourdieu had stressed the need to develop sociology as a scientific discipline and was highly critical of those sociologists he thought were too oriented toward the mass media.4 So what changed? How did Bourdieu become the leading European public intellectual by the time of his death in 2002?

I consider in this chapter the process by which Bourdieu became a public intellectual by focusing on both the intellectual field conditions and his sociological work that permitted this development. This analysis is informed by Bourdieu’s field analytical perspective. I argue that changes in Bourdieu’s position within the French intellectual field and changes within the intellectual field itself relative to other fields set the stage for Bourdieu’s strategic choices in political involvement. Bourdieu’s experience of those changes led him to shift emphasis in the way he understood the relationship between sociology and politics and the kind of role he could play in the public arena. The chapter offers, therefore, a cultural/political field explanation rather than a personal/psychological one, an explanation where personal intellectual strategy is framed and modified in changing institutional settings. The chapter does not offer an exhaustive account of Bourdieu’s political engagements but presents a selection of his works

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