We are the State: Pierre Bourdieu on the State and Political Field

Abstract

Bourdieu is best known in the Anglophone world for his analysis of the relationship between class and habitus; for perhaps the most influential account of the cultural reproduction of social differences. His writings on the state - substantial though they are - are less influential. One barrier is that much of this work is offputtingly obscure even by the standards set by his more conventionally sociological writings. While one can defend this level of complexity by arguing, as Richard Terdiman has done, that Bourdieu wishes to avoid a 'comfortable and unproblematic understanding [between reader and writer] of the meaning of words, of categories' because it precisely these that need to be problematized, the effect is alternately disheartening and irritating, even for those who honestly seek to avoid any 'hint of wilful incomprehension'. A second, and more important, possible reason for this relative lack of interest is that his conception of the state does not speak to those who have been exposed to thirty or more years of the - at least apparent - rolling back of the state. In this discussion, I wish to link the latter of these points to that made in my opening paragraph: the embeddedness of Bourdieu's account of the state (the State) in a French - or at least Continental European - context; a context which, from the perspective of much of the Anglophone world, looks atypical, not to say exotic. Before doing this, I shall seek to contextualize Bourdieu's thoughts on the state in his general sociology.