What is the nature of the modern state? How did it come into being and what are the characteristics of this distinctive field of power that has come to play such a central role in the shaping of all spheres of social, political and economic life?
In this major work the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu addresses these fundamental questions. Modifying Max Weber’s famous definition, Bourdieu defines the state in terms of the monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence, where the monopoly of symbolic violence is the condition for the possession and exercise of physical violence. The state can be reduced neither to an apparatus of power in the service of dominant groups nor to a neutral site where conflicting interests are played out: rather, it constitutes the form of collective belief that structures the whole of social life. The ‘collective fiction’ of the state Ð a fiction with very real effects - is at the same time the product of all struggles between different interests, what is at stake in these struggles, and their very foundation.
While the question of the state runs through the whole of Bourdieu’s work, it was never the subject of a book designed to offer a unified theory. The lecture course presented here, to which Bourdieu devoted three years of his teaching at the Collège de France, fills this gap and provides the key that brings together the whole of his research in this field. This text also shows ‘another Bourdieu’, both more concrete and more pedagogic in that he presents his thinking in the process of its development. While revealing the illusions of ‘state thought’ designed to maintain belief in government being oriented in principle to the common good, he shows himself equally critical of an ‘anti-institutional mood’ that is all too ready to reduce the construction of the bureaucratic apparatus to the function of maintaining social order.
At a time when financial crisis is facilitating the hasty dismantling of public services, with little regard for any notion of popular sovereignty, this book offers the critical instruments needed for a more lucid understanding of the wellsprings of domination.
Table of Contents:
YEAR 1989–1990 Lecture of 18 January 1990
An unthinkable object
The state as a neutral site
The Marxist tradition
The calendar and the structure of temporality
State categories
Acts of state
The private-home market and the state
The Barre commission on housing
Notes
Lecture of 25 January 1990
The theoretical and the empirical
State commissions and stagings
The social construction of public problems
The state as viewpoint on viewpoints
Official marriage
Theory and theory effects
The two meanings of the word ‘state’
Transforming the particular into the universal
The obsequium
Institutions as ‘organized fiduciary’
Genesis of the state. Difficulties of the undertaking
Parenthesis on the teaching of research in sociology
The state and the sociologist
Notes
Lecture of 1 February 1990
The rhetoric of the official
The public and the official
The universal other and censorship
The ‘legislator as artist’
The genesis of public discourse
Public discourse and the imposition of form
Public opinion
Notes
Lecture of 8 February 1990
The concentration of symbolic resources
Sociological reading of Franz Kafka
An untenable research programme
History and sociology
Shmuel Eisenstadt’s The Political Systems of Empires
Perry Anderson’s two books
The problem of the three routes according to Barrington Moore
Notes
Lecture of 15 February 1990
The official and the private
Sociology and history: genetic structuralism
Genetic history of the state
Game and field
Anachronism and the illusion of the nominal
The two faces of the state
Notes
YEAR 1990–1991
Lecture of 10 January 1991
Historical approach and genetic approach
Research strategy
Housing policy
Interactions and structural relations
Self-evidence as an effect of institutionalization
The effect of ‘that’s the way it is …’ and the closing of possibilities
The space of possibilities
The example of spelling
Notes
Lecture of 17 January 1991
Reminder of the course’s approach
The two meanings of the word ‘state’: state as administration, state as territory
The disciplinary division of historical work as an epistemological obstacle
Models of state genesis, 1: Norbert Elias
Models of state genesis, 2: Charles Tilly
Notes
Lecture of 24 January 1991
Reply to a question: the notion of invention under structural constraint
Models of state genesis, 3: Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer
The exemplary particularity of England: economic modernization and cultural archaisms
Notes
Lecture of 31 January 1991
Reply to questions
Cultural archaisms and economic transformations
Culture and national unity: the case of Japan
Bureaucracy and cultural integration
National unification and cultural domination
Notes
Lecture of 7 February 1991
Theoretical foundations for an analysis of state power
Symbolic power: relations of force and relations of meaning
The state as producer of principles of classification
Belief effect and cognitive structures
The coherence effect of state symbolic systems
The school timetable as a state construction
The producers of doxa
Notes
Lecture of 14 February 1991
Sociology, an esoteric science with an exoteric air
Professionals and lay people
The state structures the social order
Doxa, orthodoxy, heterodoxy
Transmutation of private into public: the appearance of the modern state in Europe
Notes
Lecture of 21 February 1991
Logic of the genesis and emergence of the state: symbolic capital
The stages of the process of concentration of capital
The dynastic state
The state as a power over powers
Concentration and dispossession of species of capital: the example of physical force capital
Constitution of a central economic capital and construction of an autonomous economic space
Notes
Lecture of 7 March 1991
Reply to questions: conformity and consensus
Concentration processes of the species of capital: resistances
The unification of the juridical market
The constitution of an interest in the universal
The state viewpoint and totalization: informational capital
Concentration of cultural capital and national construction
‘Natural nobility’ and state nobility
Lecture of 14 March 1991
Digression: an overthrow in the intellectual field
The double face of the state: domination and integration
Jus loci and jus sanguinis
Unification of the market in symbolic goods
Analogy between the religious field and the cultural field
Notes
YEAR 1991–1992
Lecture of 3 October 1991
A model of the transformations of the dynastic state
The notion of reproduction strategies
The notion of a system of reproduction strategies
The dynastic state in the light of reproduction strategies
The ‘king’s house’
Juridical logic and practical logic of the dynastic state
Objectives of the next lecture
Notes
Lecture of 10 October 1991
The ‘house’ model against historical finalism
The stakes in historical research on the state
The contradictions of the dynastic state
A tripartite structure
Notes
Lecture of 24 October 1991
Recapitulation of the logic of the course
Family reproduction and state reproduction
Digression on the history of political thought
The historical role of jurists in the process of state construction
Differentiation of power and structural corruption: an economic model
Notes
Lecture of 7 November 1991
Preamble: the pitfalls of communication in social science
The example of institutionalized corruption in China, 1: the ambiguous power of sub-bureaucrats
The example of institutionalized corruption in China, 2: the ‘pure’
The example of institutionalized corruption in China, 3: double game and double ‘I’
The genesis of the bureaucratic space and the invention of the public
Notes
Lecture of 14 November 1991
Construction of the republic and construction of the nation
The constitution of the public in the light of an English treatise on constitutional law
The use of royal seals: the chain of warrants
Notes
Lecture of 21 November 1991
Reply to a question on the public/private contrast
The transmutation of private into public: a non-linear process
The genesis of the meta-field of power: differentiation and dissociation of dynastic and bureaucratic authorities
A research programme on the French Revolution
Dynastic principle versus juridical principle as seen through the lit de justice
Methodological digression: the kitchen of political theories
Juridical struggles as symbolic struggles for power
The three contradictions of jurists
Notes
Lecture of 28 November 1991
History as a stake in struggles
The juridical field: a historical approach
Functions and functionaries
The state as fictio juris
Juridical capital as linguistic capital and mastery of practice
Jurists face the church: a corporation acquires autonomy
Reformation, Jansenism and juridism
The public: a reality without precedent that keeps coming into being
Notes
Lecture of 5 December 1991
Programme for a social history of political ideas and the state
Interest in disinterestedness
Jurists and the universal
The (false) problem of the French Revolution
The state and the nation
The state as ‘civil religion’
Nationality and citizenship: contrast between the French and German models
Struggles between interests and struggles between unconscious forms in political debate
Notes
Lecture of 12 December 1991
The construction of political space: the parliamentary game
Digression: television in the new political game
From the paper state to the real state
Domesticating the dominated: the dialectic of discipline and philanthropy
The theoretical dimension of state construction
Questions for a conclusion
Notes
APPENDICES
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) was one of the most influential sociologists and anthropologists of the late twentieth century. He was Professor of Sociology at the Collège de France and Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales. His many works include Outline of a Theory of Practice, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, The Rules of Art, The Logic of Practice and Pascalian Meditations.
Review :
“This is a major book for the social sciences. Unlike the majority of books on the state, it actually provides a basis for future empirical work on how states operate. Of the three kinds of books that have relevance for the academic reader—books to skim, books to read, and books to study—it is emphatically a book to study. One that is bold, profound and enlightening.”
European Journal of Sociology
"This enormous collection of lecture notes could make you feel lost in different countries and different historical periods, but it is successful in sounding very coherent with a very fluent narrative, and it is not distracting for the reader. These lectures certainly present an illuminating and broad content that any social scientist - not necessarily political scientists - should benefit from when reading this book."
Political Studies Review
"Bourdieu’s insights break fresh ground in the critical understanding of the state and its perpetration of power.This book impels us to consider the state in its all nuances, while unworking the constructivism immanent in its normativization, and should be of interest to social and political scientists."
Avishek Ray, Rouya Turkiyyah
