Pierre Bourdieu

Michael James Grenfell, Richard Bailey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781472518743
• eBook ISBN: 9781441135810
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu was a key thinker about education and educational processes in the second half of the twentieth century. He made his name in seminal texts such as The Inheritors and Reproduction in which he analysed academic discourse and showed how differences in cultural capital led to different outcomes for those who passed through school and university. His concepts of Habitus and Field have since been used extensively in educational research.

This book begins by setting his intellectual development within his own biography and then discusses each of his major works on education in turn: from the early studies of students and their learning to later analyses of the French academic space and the elite training colleges. There is also critical discussion of a range of commentators' views on this approach. The book concludes with a series of applications of Bourdieusian thinking on various educational topics: teacher education, classroom discourse, higher education and policy. No educational discussion is complete without consideration from a Bourdieusian perspective. This book shows how and why.

Part 1

Intellectual Biography

Introduction

This first part of this book sets out an ‘Intellectual Biography’ of Bourdieu. It comprises five main chapters. The first chapter offers biographical details of Bourdieu’s life and work. Bourdieu often made a plea that his ideas should be understood in terms of the times in which the various works were produced. The next four chapters attempt to provide the structure for such a ‘socio-genetic’ reading of his publications. First, a historical background is established, against which, second, details of the French intellectual tradition are set. These chapters cover the period from the Great Revolution of 1789 to the Second World War. Various philosophical, social, economic and historical trends are traced across this period. In particular, we look at the founding fathers of sociology and the way commonalities of ideas and concerns fed into the period which directly influenced Bourdieu. The next chapter deals in detail with Bourdieu and the post-war intellectual climate. We consider both what Bourdieu responded to and reacted against. Ideas and events are interwoven. The whole provides a historical and philosophical background to understanding Bourdieu’s ‘theory of practice’, which will then be set out in detail in the next part of this book.

Chapter 1

Biography

Pierre Bourdieu was born on the 1 August 1930 in Denguin, a small village in the Béarn region of the French Pyrenées-Atlantiques, in the south-west corner of rural France. His father was an office worker cum postman for the French Post Office, although he had also worked as a sharecropper. Reputedly, the family was one of modest means and of limited education or training. His father left school before completing his education. Only his mother continued to the age of 16. Gascon, a now moribund regional language, was spoken at home, which posed few problems in an age before mass communication. This was a fairly isolated existence with outside contact being largely with local towns and markets. The nearest cities – Toulouse, Bordeaux, Montpelier, themselves still quite unmodernized in France between the wars – would be visited only occasionally. The major economic activities for the inhabitants of Denguin revolved around agriculture and rural crafts.

There are few published details of Bourdieu’s early life. We can surmise that he was a gifted pupil, even at primary school, since he was subsequently sent to the main lycée in Pau as a boarder. He clearly succeeded academically as he went on to the Lycée Le Grand in Paris to complete his secondary education. This school was a renowned preparatory institution for pupils destined for the very highest and most prestigious French training schools. Two of these dominated as the very pinnacles of French education: the École Polytechnique (EP) and the École Normale Supérieure (ENS). Bourdieu went to the latter in 1951, graduating as an agrégé in philosophy in 1955.

After a brief period teaching in Moulins, he undertook his military service in Algeria where, eventually, he also taught at the Faculté des Lettres in Algiers. This period was marked by the appearance of his first publications; most noticeably Sociologie de l’Algérie, which was first published in 1958 in the famous French Que sais-je? series. Other articles on Algeria followed.

In 1960, Bourdieu returned to France. He worked as a ‘teaching assistant’ to Raymond Aron who at that time was one of France’s leading intellectuals. Bourdieu progressed to teach at the University of Lille. He married Marie-Claire Brizzard in 1962, with whom he had three sons: Jérôme, Emmanuel and Laurent. In 1964, he was appointed as Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, where he took over the directorship of the Centre de Sociologie Européenne. In 1964, he also became editor to the ‘Le Sens Commun’ series of the ‘Éditions de Minuit’ publishing house. These academic and commercial positions provided Bourdieu with a base from which he was able to develop his research agenda. Empirical studies were undertaken on the French education system, museums and photography as he built up a research team around him. The outcomes and results of these studies were published in a series of books and articles; for example, Les Héritiers. Les etudiants et la Culture (1979b/1964), La Reproduction (1977a/1970) on education; Un Art moyen (1990a/1965) and L’Amour de l’art (1990b/1966) on photography and museums.

In 1968, France was shaken by a series of national strikes by both workers and students. By this time, Bourdieu was known as a sociologist in France but his reputation had not yet extended beyond its borders. He published a major treatise on sociology in which he set out his principal methodological concerns: Le Métier de sociologue (1991b/1968), which included illustrative extracts from key thinkers as a background to the approach described; for example, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Mauss, Bachelard and Canguilhem. This book was then followed up by a major exposition of what he called his ‘theory of practice’: Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (1977b/1972), which itself also included further work on his Algerian studies. Esquisse was translated into English in 1977, the year in which La Reproduction also appeared in English. In 1971, Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education had been published. This book was a collection of papers edited by Michael Young (1971) and was a seminal publication in defining a new sociology of education. Bourdieu had two papers included: ‘Intellectual field and creative project’ and ‘Systems of education and systems of thought’. In fact, neither of these articles were written especially for Knowledge and Control. However, their appearance in this book brought Bourdieu’s work to the attention of an English-speaking world. The publication of Reproduction and the Outline of a Theory of Practice consolidated his reputation as key sociological thinker – in education at least.

However, Bourdieu’s next major work returned to questions of culture and taste. La distinction was published in 1979 (1984a/1979) and quickly became a sociological classic, to be cited next to such canonical works as Durkheim’s Suicide and Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In La distinction, Bourdieu set out to demonstrate what we might term the ‘sociological construction of taste’ and, by implication, aesthetics (see Grenfell and Hardy, 2007). His next major books, however, returned to educational matters. Homo Academicus (1988/1984) is a study of Bourdieu’s own academic field and its mechanisms of self-reproduction and competitiveness; while La Noblesse d’État (1996b/1989) examines the forms of influence constructed and used by those involved with the French elite training schools, of which Bourdieu’s own ENS was one. By this stage, Bourdieu was writing freely and extensively on a wide range of topics. Further methodological and, by implication, philosophical statements followed: most noticeably, Le Sens pratique (1990c/1980) (itself a reworking of his Algerian studies), Questions de sociologie (1993a/1980), and Choses dites (1990d/1987). L’ontologie de politique de Martin Heidegger (1991c/1988) offered a socio-historical reading of a key twentieth-century philosopher. He also published a major statement on language: Ce que parler veut dire (1991a/1982).

In 1981, François Mitterand won the French Presidential elections and, after the subsequent parliamentary elections, formed the first socialist government of the Fifth Republic. Bourdieu’s most direct involvement in political power came in 1984 when he chaired a committee of the Collège de France commissioned by Mitterand to look at the future of French education. Subsequently, Bourdieu co-authored a report (1985a) which provided a set of guiding principles for education. Although, Bourdieu undertook a series of media events to explain and publicize the proposals, he eventually withdrew from active involvement with the Mitterand government when it became clear that few if any of their proposals were going to be adopted in any meaningful way.

If, by the last decade of the twentieth century, Bourdieu’s profile was more evident in France, his reputation abroad developed to the point where he became a thinker and writer of major international status. His books appeared in English with shorter and shorter delays after their French publication. His influence spread beyond sociology and his main preoccupations, and now included such diverse disciplines as architecture, geography, art and literature, economics, and politics. In 1981, Bourdieu was named Chair in Sociology at the Collège de France; an institution, seen as an exclusive ‘club’, which groups together just 52 members drawn from the crème de la crème of French academia. His inaugural lecture was published in 1982, entitled Leçon sur une leçon (1982).

In 1993, Bourdieu was awarded the Gold Medal from the French CNRS – the highest accolade that can be bestowed on an intellectual in France. That same year, La Misère du monde was published (1999a/1993). In this book, Bourdieu and his team set out to catalog ‘the weight of the world’; namely, the poverty of experience, both material and psychological, of various groups within French society. Its impact was instantaneous. More than 150,000 copies were sold, extracts were re-enacted in theatres, and its depiction of France in the late twentieth century was the subject of numerous media events. Bourdieu was now fast becoming the ‘public intellectual’, appearing on TV, radio and in the press. In 1975, he had complemented his editorship of Le Sens Commun by founding the academic review Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales. Actes served as a publication output for Bourdieu and his team for the publication of topical papers, work in progress and initial reports. Its international perspective meant that it attracted a wide audience. It also offered a sociological perspective of political issues. Actes targeted an academic audience, but by the 1990s Bourdieu sought a medium through which he could address a larger public. In 1998, he founded Raisons d’Agir, a series aimed at the production of small publications accessible to a more general reader. His own contributions to the series – Contre-feux (1998a) and Contre-feux 2 (2001b) – included a collection of Bourdieu’s more polemical and journalistic texts. These texts targeted the neo-liberal world of market economics and argued for the formation of a new social movement in Europe. This mission and these publications were supported by his further interventions in the media, as well as his membership of several pressure groups seeking social and political reforms (for example, 1994a, 1994b, 1996c, 1998b, 1999b, 2000a, 2000b).

This activity can be understood as Bourdieu adopting a more public and political role, albeit on the margins of politics. Nonetheless, academic works continued to appear at frequent intervals. His principal analysis of the artistic field was published – Les Règles de l’art (1996a/1992) – and had, at its core, a study of the French nineteenth-century writer Gustave Flaubert. A further major artistic study of the ‘Pre-Impressionist’ painter Manet formed part of his ten-week leçon at the Collège de France in 2000. He addressed the issue of gender in La Domination masculine (2001a/1998). His critique of methodology and philosophy continued in Réponses (1992a), Raisons pratiques (1998c/1994), Méditations pascaliennes (2000a/1997), Science de la science et réflexivité (2001c).

He died of cancer on 23 January 2002 and was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery, along with many of France’s most illustrious scholars, artists and writers.

Chapter 2

French Historical Background

As noted in the Introduction to Part I Bourdieu asks for a ‘sociogenetic’ reading of his work (1993b: 263). He asks for this in order to offset the misunderstanding, objections and refutations that his work has traditionally attracted, and which arises as a result of commentators ignoring the ‘social conditions’ which have given rise to particular writings. From the last chapter, it is possible to see that Bourdieu’s own biography was closely linked to his various projects and publications; and that these concerns were a response to contemporary events. The focus of the present volume is ‘Bourdieu and Education’ and, certainly, for much of his academic career, he was known mostly as a ‘sociologist of education’. However, we shall see that in this context both terms are problematic. His ‘sociology’ was highly individual, and might equally be called ‘social philosophy’, ‘anthropology’ or ‘ethnology’. And, if ‘education’ was one of his major preoccupations, this was only true in terms of the part educational processes played in the experiences of people and their life trajectories. The next two chapters of the book provide a ‘socio-genetic’ context to his work. In the first chapter, I shall consider France and the socio-political tradition which formed an important background to Bourdieu’s writing. The next chapter will then look at the intellectual tradition in France.

Bourdieu was born in the 1930s, a pivotal period in French history. At this time, the Third Republic was some 60 years old; the longest any political establishment had survived since the Great Revolution in 1789. During these years, France had experienced almost continual social upheaval. Some claim that the forces unleashed by the Great Revolution were not really laid to rest until after the humiliation inflicted on France by the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71 and the subsequent trauma of the Paris Commune. In pre-revolutionary times, the allegiance of Frenchmen was claimed by God and the King. The Palace of Versailles was a perfect illustration of the aristocratic court in which French noblemen lived, while large portions of the rest of the population starved. The Revolution swept all this away in the name of Equality, Liberty and Universal Brotherhood. When the First Republic was born, the ‘King’ was dead, and ‘God’ along with him. However, the actuality of French life trailed behind such revolutionary rhetoric, and it was to experience a Second Republic, three Empires and attempts at the restoration of the monarchy before a stable republican system was finally established in 1871. Nonreligious State education came later in the 1880s. The Church was finally separated from the State in 1905. Although, the principles of the Revolution were clear, they did not entirely purge the forces of patriotism and the ongoing nationalism of the men of the Left and Right. Napoleon Bonaparte rose as a revolutionary leader, but then had himself crowned Emperor. Ambitions to extend France’s natural frontiers united, in spirit at least, both those who sought to export the Revolution and those with more traditional Nationalist leanings. During the nineteenth century, national strength was often defined in terms of the procurement of foreign territory. For example, Algeria in North Africa was invaded in 1830 to back up the restored monarchy, and other overseas territories were quickly added (see Grenfell, 2006). ‘Insecurity’ is the watchword to understanding nineteenth-century France. Nothing, it seemed, defined the French view of themselves in the world as did the relationship between these internal and external forces.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Frenchmen were criticizing the record of the Third Republic in protecting national interests. Politically, the old monarchists and Bonapartist Right had moved to the Centre where, paradoxically, they joined those of the radical Left. The First World War was a defining moment in recasting the political landscape. The revolutionary Left, born of eighteenth-century Marxist communism and given a heroic twist by the Paris Commune, took the Russian Revolution of 1917 as a sign of the imminence of International communism. The broader Socialist Party was reformist. The new Right, however, was born out of extreme reaction to the Dreyfus Affair, which implicated the army in political corruption. This sense of outrage targeted what was regarded as a weak republican regime. Under the twin threats from without (invasion from Germany) and within (weak political leadership), the Right reverted to traditional themes of counter-revolution, the strength of traditional values, authority of the State, and even monarchy and Catholicism.

Victory in the First World War went some way to bolster French political rulers. However, growing economic problems together with an increasingly unstable international situation only added to the sense of inevitable catastrophe. Economic crisis was precipitated by financial crashes, unemployment and reports of corruption. The very system of democratic Capitalism was called into question and then directly challenged by the twin alternatives of Communism and National Socialism. This issue was not resolved until a Second World War was fought.

If the political situation in France was unstable, what of the French people themselves? The most noticeable phenomenon of the nineteenth century was the sluggish speed with which France became industrialized. Steady industrial advances were made, especially during the Second Empire and the Third Republic, but this was quite late in comparison to other European countries. What industry there was, was to be found in the north, in the traditional heavy industrial sectors and around Paris. By the time of the outbreak of the Second World War, some 40 per cent of the population were still employed in agricultural work compared to 5 per cent in the UK. The railways were also constructed comparatively late in France (1850s and 1860s). With industrialization, France increasingly experienced the type of ‘rural exodus’ other countries had undergone a century earlier. With new urban environments, lifestyle, habits and beliefs changed. A world which revolved around community and the Church was replaced by secular distractions and the anonymity of urban living. The phenom...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Foreword
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Intellectual Biography
• Part 2 Critical Exposition of Bourdieu’s Educational Thought
• Part 3 The Reception and Influence of Bourdieu’s Work
• Part 4 Bourdieu: Present and Future Relevance
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright