On the State

Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989 - 1992

Pierre Bourdieu

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780745663302, 9780745663296
• eBook ISBN: 9781509533916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Year 1991–1992

Lecture of 3 October 1991

1. A model of the transformations of the dynastic state
2. The notion of reproduction strategies
3. The notion of a system of reproduction strategies
4. The dynastic state in the light of reproduction strategies
5. The ‘king’s house’
6. Juridical logic and practical logic of the dynastic state
7. Objectives of the next lecture

A model of the transformations of the dynastic state

Having described [in the last two years] the concentration process of different species of capital that accompanies the birth of the state, I would like now to try to trace the transformation, effected over centuries, of the personal power concentrated in the person of the king into the diffuse and differentiated powers subsequently associated with the idea of the state. The process I am going to describe today could be called, to give you an overall pattern, ‘From the king’s house to raison d’état’.¹ How does the transition take place from power concentrated in an individual, even if signs of differentiation, of a division in the work of domination, are apparent right from the start, to a power that is divided and shared between different persons with relations of competition between them, conflictual relations within what I call a ‘field of power’?²

I shall try to construct a model. As I have said several times, I do not have any ambition to compete here with historians, and as I always say without false modesty, I am aware of being unable to draw on the historical culture that would be needed to completely validate the model I propose. I want to construct both a model of the logic of the dynastic state, the state identified with the person of the king and the royal lineage, and a model of the process by which this state is transformed. I want both to describe the logic of the dynastic state and the contradictions that are inherent in its functioning, contradictions which, as I see it, bring about the supersession of the dynastic state in favour of impersonal forms of state.

In order to construct the model of the dynastic state, I shall draw on work that I carried out a long time back on the peasants of Béarn. If I permit myself to do this, it is because this work has since served as a basis for historical studies, and I believe that a certain number of historians, in particular Andrew Lewis whom I shall refer to here, have drawn on anthropological work of the kind I conducted in order to understand the logic of functioning of the royal family. Also – how can I say this without being arrogant? – my work on kinship in Béarn³ marked a certain break with the tradition that was dominant at the time I conducted it, this being the structuralist tradition. My work aimed to show that far from being, as people thought, the product of conscious rules or unconscious models, matrimonial exchanges were the product of strategies guided by the ‘interests’ of a house. Since this work, Lévi-Strauss and others have spoken of ‘house systems’,⁴ to refer to the type of kinship relation that can be observed in such places as south-west France. These house societies are societies in which the family father is called capmaysouè, ‘head of the house’. The king is a capmaysouè, a point that I shall return to, a head of the house, and heads of houses are in a sense the agents of an instance that transcends them and is called the house. In Béarn, for example, a person is known by his forename followed by the name of the house. People say ‘Jean of So-and-so’s place.’⁵ In a certain sense, the subject of individual actions, matrimonial actions, is the house, which has interests that transcend those of individuals, and must be perpetuated both in its material inheritance – lands, etc., which must particularly be kept from division – [and in its] symbolic inheritance [which] is still more important: the name must remain free of any stain, it must avoid degradation, derogation, etc.

It is not by chance that it was American sociologists and historians who transferred onto royalty a model developed for the lowest strata of French societies. This was undoubtedly because there were unconscious resistances on the part of [French] historians – though they were all in love with ethnology, ethnology was all the rage with them – to apply models developed for the most backward regions of rural France in order to understand the summits of the state. There were other obstacles as well, and I believe that in the face of these problems, historians often swing between two poles … I was going to say two errors: that of assimilating former societies by an unconscious anachronism, or on the contrary relegating them to an absolute exoticism. In fact, it is only necessary to see that a very general model can account for phenomena that are seemingly very different, following the logic [that] the same cause produces the same effects. When you have a lineage that has a material and a symbolic inheritance – an inheritance which in one case is called ‘crown’, and in another case ‘house’ – that has to be perpetuated through time, you observe practices with very similar logics; and the social agents, whether they are kings of France or small proprietors of 15 hectares, will exhibit behaviours that are relatively intelligible according to the same principles.

The notion of reproduction strategies

On the basis of this model, I developed the idea of a system of reproduction strategies, which I would like to explain a bit, as it is indispensable for understanding the use I shall go on to make of the model. I tried to give a methodical formulation in The State Nobility,⁶ where I very rapidly explain what I understand by a system of reproduction strategies, stressing on the one hand the idea of ‘system’ and on the other hand what precisely should be understood by ‘strategies’. To start with ‘system’: I believe that in order to understand the conduct of royal or non-royal houses, and more generally of all social agents, certain practices that social science has studied separately have to be seen as constituting a whole, practices that are generally [assigned] to different social sciences: demography for fertility strategies, law for strategies of succession, the science of education for educational strategies, economics for economic strategies, and so on. With the notion of habitus, which is a generative principle of systematic behaviours, I try to account for the fact that, in order to understand a certain number of fundamental human behaviours that are oriented towards the preservation or elevation of the position in social space occupied by a family or an individual, you have to take into account a certain number of strategies that are seemingly unrelated, strategies without a palpable connection [between them].

I shall give a list of these strategies.⁷ First of all they involve fertility: family planning strategies, for example,⁸ which may be practised by way of matrimonial strategies – here you can immediately see the link between the different strategies. It is very well known how in many societies one of the ways of controlling births is to delay the age of marriage. Fertility strategies may be practised either directly or indirectly. Their function, in the logic of reproduction, is to reduce the dangers of property division; thus there is a clear relationship between the practice of limiting births and succession strategies. Then there are succession strategies in the strict sense, which are often governed by customs or laws of succession. In the peasant families of south-west France, for example, just as in royal families, the right of primogeniture, the right of the first-born, reserves succession to the eldest to the disadvantage of the younger, and solutions have to be found to provide for the latter. In Gascony, younger sons were the victims of a succession law that condemned them to be what the Béarn peasants called ‘unpaid domestics’, without a wage, or else ‘émigrés’. Succession strategies may dictate fertility strategies, as the two are interdependent. Then there are educational strategies, in a very broad sense of the term: in relation to kingship, the education of the dauphin must be borne in mind. In his book Royal Succession in Capetian France, Andrew Lewis lays great emphasis on the mode of succession as a function of succession strategies, on the privileges granted to the heir and the compensations that must necessarily be made to the younger sons: apanages, etc. But as there is no explicit idea here of a succession strategy system – and I believe this is precisely why the effort of modelling is worthwhile – he does not take educational strategies into account at all.

Now, in order for a system such as the one I am going to describe, and that Lewis dissects, to function, agents have to be prepared to make it function, they have to be appropriately disposed. Paradoxically, heirs are not always spontaneously disposed to inherit – something that will not surprise those who have been listening to me for a long time, but for those among you who are newcomers, you will be surprised to hear that one of the problems for societies with inheritance is to produce heirs disposed to let themselves be inherited by this inheritance. A few years back I wrote a long commentary on Flaubert’s Sentimental Education,⁹ in which the principal hero, Frédéric, is precisely an heir who does not want to inherit, and who because of this constantly swings between breaking with his inheritance – he wants to become an artist – and accepting it. This is a paradox that people tend to forget, since you spontaneously think, in a naively critical view of the social order, that heirs are only too happy to inherit. But that is not true at all, there are unwilling heirs at all levels of the social scale: sons of miners, for example, who don’t want to go down the mine, though far fewer than you might believe, precisely because the system of reproduction functions; and there are also sons of kings who have no desire to inherit or who behave in such a way that they do not really inherit the inheritance, that is, they are not what they should be to qualify for inheriting.

The role of educational strategies is thus absolutely capital, as a real work of inculcation is needed to produce a king who wants to inherit and is qualified to do so. It is very clear, when you think of the education of girls in societies in which the capital of honour is very important, how fundamental a strategy the education of girls is in the system of reproduction strategies: it is by way of girls that dishonour comes, or excessive fertility, etc. In these societies, the obsessional gaze directed at the virtue of girls is easy to understand as an element of the reproduction system. I spoke of educational strategies, but I could easily expand at length on the relationships between the different strategies that I list for purposes of analysis, even though they are all interdependent. Those strategies that I call prophylactic become very important in certain societies, such as our own: they are strategies aiming to ensure the perpetuation of the lineage in a good biological condition, as it were. Medical strategies, for example, with health expenditure, are also important: these are strategies by which labour-power and reproduction power are reproduced.

I come now to the more obvious strategies that one thinks of right away: economic strategies in the strict sense, such as strategies of investment, saving, etc., which are an element of the system. To the extent that the inheritance consists of land, a material patrimony, economic strategies to perpetuate the house require strategies of hoarding, investment, accumulation, etc. There are also strategies for the investment and accumulation of social capital, that is, strategies aiming to maintain relationships already established. In societies such as the Kabyle, for example, a very large part of the work that agents perform is a work of maintaining relationships with kinfolk in the very broad sense, whether kinship established by alliance or kinship established by succession; this work, which consists in visits, exchange of gifts and presents, etc. is extremely important inasmuch as it is in this way that the family’s symbolic capital is perpetuated. Having a large family, for example, means being able to have a funeral procession of three hundred people, including two hundred men firing guns. [In these societies], processions and all group exhibitions are rather like demonstrations in our societies: exhibitions of symbolic capital, that is, a social capital built up by years and years of cul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Editors’ note
• YEAR 1989–1990
• YEAR 1990–1991
• YEAR 1991–1992
• APPENDICES
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement