The Sociologist and the Historian

Pierre Bourdieu, Roger Chartier

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745679594, 9780745679587
• eBook ISBN: 9780745688985
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

In 1988, the renowned sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and the leading historian Roger Chartier met for a series of lively discussions that were broadcast on French public radio. Published here for the first time, these conversations are an accessible and engaging introduction to the work of these two great thinkers, who discuss their work and explore the similarities and differences between their disciplines with the clarity and frankness of the spoken word.

Bourdieu and Chartier discuss some of the core themes of Bourdieu's work, such as his theory of fields, his notions of habitus and symbolic power and his account of the relation between structures and individuals, and they examine the relevance of these ideas to the study of historical events and processes. They also discuss at length Bourdieu's work on culture and aesthetics, including his work on Flaubert and Manet and his analyses of the formation of the literary and artistic fields. Reflecting on the differences between sociology and history, Bourdieu and Chartier observe that while history deals with the past, sociology is dealing with living subjects who are often confronted with discourses that speak about them, and therefore it disrupts, disconcerts and encounters resistance in ways that few other disciplines do.

This unique dialogue between two great figures is a testimony to the richness of Bourdieu's thought and its enduring relevance for the humanities and social sciences today.

1
The Sociologist's Craft

Roger Chartier:	It can't be easy being a sociologist, given that, when we look at the way that your work has been received, we are struck by the tremendous contradictions coming from writers' pens and existing in people's minds. Because, after all, the question is whether sociology is more fitted to mobilizing the masses or causing the labour movement to despair? How can sociological texts, which are usually illegible, be both so complex that they are impenetrable and at the same time bear a message that is particularly clear and, for some readers, radically subversive? And can sociology claim – as we sometimes get the impression – to be a dominant science, a science of sciences, while you are deconstructing it as a discipline by everything that you write? This sum of contradictions can perhaps serve as the starting point for the first of the present interviews, as they focus on a series of fundamental questions: what is sociology? What is it to be a sociologist? How should we conceive the relationship that sociology has with other disciplines which, like my own discipline of history, find themselves faced with this protean and somewhat disturbing monster?
Pierre Bourdieu:	Indeed, I do think that sociology is upsetting, but the rather obsessional feeling that I might experience as a sociologist is neutralized, despite everything, by the very contradictions between these various attacks. In particular, I think that the accusations of a political kind directed against sociology have at least the virtue of being contradictory; and in this way, they give it life. Well, it is true that sociology is not always easy to live with.
Roger Chartier:	Yes, since the impression is given that it is a discipline which, by its attempt at reflexivity on the social world, at the same time situates the person producing it in the very field that he is in the process of describing. In this sense, it is not easy to live with, not simply because it gives other people an image of themselves that they are often unwilling to tolerate, but also because it implicates the person producing it in the analysis itself.
Pierre Bourdieu:	I have had the experience of such a situation: for example, when I speak about sociology to non-sociologists, non-professionals, I'm always torn between two possible strategies. The first is presenting sociology as an academic discipline, as something like history or philosophy, and in this case I get a reception that is interested but strictly academic. Or else I try to exert the specific effect of sociology, in other words try to place my listeners in a situation of self-analysis, and from that point on I know that I am exposing myself to becoming a scapegoat for the company assembled. For example, I had this experience two years ago when I went to the Brussels Philharmonic,^1 invited by an official of the Amis de la Philharmonique de Bruxelles, who, very kindly but a little naively, had asked me to come and explain my views, my representations of art, the sociology of music, and so on. And up to the last moment – I remember very well – in the car in which we were setting out in the night, I repeated to this person: ‘You don't realize what you're doing, you're asking me to do something dreadful, and it will be dramatic: there will be incidents, I'll provoke insults.’ He thought that I was just having the usual lecturer's stage fright. And then what I feared really did happen: it was a genuine ‘happening’, and for the whole of the next week this was all that people talked about in the intellectual milieu of Brussels. A friend of mine heard one of the participants say that not since the Surrealists had he heard such a heated and extraordinary debate as on that occasion. Now, the things I said were actually quite anodyne, euphemistic and neutralized. I had taken precautions. Right in front of me in the hall was an elderly lady, very well dressed, with her handbag on her knees, a bit like at the Collège de France, and I was very concerned not to shock her at all; so I was as euphemistic as possible. Despite this, however, I think that sociological ‘truth’ – I put it in quotation marks here – is so violent that it injures people; it makes them suffer and, at the same time, people free themselves from this suffering by shifting it back to the person who is apparently causing it.
Roger Chartier:	That is perhaps the difference between sociology and history, which talks about dead people, and perhaps also ethnology and anthropology, which describe subjects who are only rarely, and in exceptional circumstances, confronted with discourses that speak about them.
Pierre Bourdieu:	Indeed, here again I can answer with an example. This is a story that I find quite funny. One of my colleagues at the Collège de France, an eminent member of the Institut,^2 told me that my writings had aroused a certain resistance among members of the Institut, even outspoken resistance. And among these writings, the most shocking was an article that I published under the title ‘The Categories of Professorial Understanding’^3 – parenthetically, a highly ironic title, there are very often things that make me laugh as I write them; unfortunately, there is no way of expressing laughter in writing, that's one of the big lacunas among graphic symbols. So, I gave the article this title, ‘The Categories of Professorial Understanding’, and in this article I analysed, on the one hand, the comments made on his students' essays by a teacher at the Lycée Fénelon who taught the khâgne^4 class, and on the other hand the obituaries of former students of the École normale supérieure. And this eminent colleague, an Egyptologist in fact, said to me: ‘All the same, you know, you did take obituaries as an object of study.’ I replied: ‘But my dear colleague, how can you say that to me? What is your own object if not obituaries?’ And I think this gives a very good sense of the gap between sociology and history. The historian permits himself to take many things as self-evident, and even as signs of achievement. If, for example, a historian reveals hidden relationships – liaisons, we call them – between one particular historical character and another, he is praised and this is seen as a discovery. Whereas if I were to publish, let's say, a tenth of what would need to be said in order to understand the functioning of the world of the university – the academic fields – I would be seen as an infamous informer. On the other hand, I think that distance in time has a virtue of neutralizing – as everyone knows. In the case of sociology, however, we are always walking on hot coals, and the things we discuss are alive, they're not dead and buried.
Roger Chartier:	This is why we thought that this first interview could be focused on the political effects of intellectual work and, taking the case of sociology, could show how the figure of the intellectual has shifted on the French intellectual scene. By and large, from a figure that was prophetic, messianic, denunciatory, at a macroscopic level – perhaps the name of Sartre is emblematic of this type of discourse, the post-war Sartre – towards work of a different order. Foucault had a formula that I find very striking; he said that his work, in the end, was one of stripping away certain things that were self-evident, certain commonplaces. It seems to me that your view and Foucault's are very close in this respect. Isn't that a formula that you could apply to yourself?
Pierre Bourdieu:	Quite so. I think that one point of total agreement between us is repudiation of the great figure of the ‘total intellectual’, as I call it, of whom Sartre was the embodiment par excellence, the intellectual who fulfils the role of prophet. Max Weber says that the prophet is the person who gives a total response to total questions, questions of life and death, and the like. And the philosopher, in his Sartrean incarnation, is a prophetic figure in the strict sense of the term, that is, responding globally to existential problems, problems of life, political problems, etc. For our generation, partly because we were somewhat overwhelmed and tired of this totalizing role, it was inconceivable to follow in Sartre's footsteps; to parody Malraux's formula, we did not want to issue the coin of the absolute.^5 In other words, no one can answer everything any more; you have to answer partial questions, questions deliberately constituted as partial, but answer these completely, or at least as completely as possible given the state of the instruments of knowledge. This kind of minimizing redefinition of the intellectual undertaking is, I believe, very important, as it is an advance in the direction of a greater seriousness, both scientifically and politically. What I might add in relation to Foucault is that I have a rather activist conception of science, which doesn't at all mean the same as ‘engaged’. Basically, I believe that social science, whether it is aware of this or not, whether it wishes to or not, responds to highly important questions; at any rate it raises these, and has the duty to raise them better than they are raised in the regular social world. For example, better than they are raised in the journalistic milieu, better than they are raised among essayists, better than they are raised in the milieu of false science.
Roger Chartier:	Are you not on somewhat dangerous ground in appealing to the notion of science? I read somewhere that you were spoken about as ‘new-look Zhdanovism’.^6 How is it possible to constitute the definition of what one understands by science without falling back into the old habit of making distinctions ‘scientifically’ and ‘institutionally’ – because an authority was charged with imposing this distinction – between science and non-science?
Pierre Bourdieu:	Yes, exactly, I think this is one of the major misunderstandings between myself – at least, between what I am trying to do – and many of my contemporaries, let's say people of my generation who were as it were born into intellectual and political life precisely in the epoch of Zhdanovism, and who at that time were Zhdanovists while I was anti-Zhdanovist – and I believe this was an important difference – who believed they could recognize in the work that sociology does what was practised under the name of science in the era of Stalinism, and particularly the break between science and ideology that I never adopted for myself, that I radically contest, as it is a mystical break and has been taken up – and not by chance – by philosophers and never by scientists, by practitioners of research. This break had a function quite analogous to that found in religious and prophetic discourses: it permitted a separation between ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• 1: The Sociologist's Craft
• 2: Illusions and Knowledge
• 3: Structures and the Individual
• 4: Habitus and Field
• 5: Manet, Flaubert and Michelet
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