On the State (eBook)

Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989 - 1992

Pierre Bourdieu (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
978-1-5095-3391-6 (ISBN)

Infos

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.

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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 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 Coll ge 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.

Rezensionen

''The state is this institution that has the extraordinary power of
producing a socially ordered world without necessarily giving
orders, without exerting a constant coercion there isn't a
policeman behind every car, as people often say. This kind of
quasi- magical effect deserves explanation. All other effects
military coercion, economic coercion by way of taxation are in my
view secondary in relation to this. I believe that the initial
accumulation, contrary to what is maintained by a certain
materialist tradition (materialist in the impoverished sense of the
term), is an accumulation of symbolic capital: the whole of my work
is intended to produce a materialist theory of the symbolic, which
is traditionally opposed to the material.''

Pierre Bourdieu

Textauszug

Lecture of 18 January 1990

1. An unthinkable object
2. The state as neutral site
3. The Marxist tradition
4. The calendar and the structure of temporality
5. State categories
6. Acts of state
7. The private-home market and the state
8. The Barre commission on housing

An unthinkable object

When we study the state, we must be on guard more than ever against ‘prenotions’ in the Durkheimian sense, against received ideas and spontaneous sociology. To sum up the analyses I gave in previous years’ lecture courses, and particularly the historical analysis of the relationship between sociology and the state, I noted that we risked applying to the state a ‘state thinking’, and I insisted on the fact that our thinking, the very structures of consciousness by which we construct the social world and the particular object that is the state, are very likely the product of the state itself. By a procedural reflex, a professional effect, each time I have tackled a new object what I was doing appeared to me to be perfectly justified, and I would say that the further I advance in my work on the state, the more convinced I am that, if we have a particular difficulty in thinking this object, it is because it is – and I weigh my words – almost unthinkable. If it is so easy to say easy things about this object, that is precisely because we are in a certain sense penetrated by the very thing we have to study. I have previously tried to analyse the public space, the world of public office, as a site where the values of disinterestedness are officially recognized, and where, to a certain extent, agents have an interest in disinterestedness.1

These two themes [public space and disinterestedness] are extremely important, since I believe that they bring to light how before arriving at a correct conception – if this is indeed possible – we must break through a series of screens and representations, the state being – in so far as it has an existence – a principle of production, of legitimate representation of the social world. If I had to give a provisional definition of what is called ‘the state’, I would say that the sector of the field of power, which may be called ‘administrative field’ or ‘field of public office’, this sector that we particularly have in mind when we speak of ‘state’ without further precision, is defined by possession of the monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence. Already several years ago,2 I made an addition to the famous definition of Max Weber, who defined the state [as the] ‘monopoly of legitimate violence’,3 which I corrected by adding ‘monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence’, inasmuch as the monopoly of symbolic violence is the condition for possession of the exercise of the monopoly of physical violence itself. In other words, my definition, as I see it, underlies Weber’s definition. But it still remains abstract, above all if you do not have the context in which I elaborated it. These are provisional definitions in order to try to reach at least a kind of provisional agreement as to what I am speaking about, since it is very hard to speak about something without at least spelling out what one is speaking about. They are provisional definitions designed to be improved and corrected.

The state as a neutral site

The state may be defined as a principle of orthodoxy, that is, a hidden principle that can be grasped only in the manifestations of public order, understood simultaneously as physical order, the opposite of disorder, anarchy and civil war, for example. A hidden principle that can be grasped in the manifestations of public order understood in both the physical and the symbolic sense. Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, makes a distinction between logical conformity and moral conformity.4 The state, as it is commonly understood, is the foundation of both the logical and the moral conformity of the social world. Logical conformity, in Durkheim’s sense, consists in the fact that the agents of the social world have the same logical perceptions – the immediate agreement established between people who have the same categories of thought, of perception, of construction of reality. Moral conformity is agreement on a certain number of values. Readings of Durkheim have always stressed moral conformity, forgetting the logical conformity that, in my view, is its foundation.

This provisional definition would consist in saying that the state is that which founds the logical conformity and moral conformity of the social world, and in this way, the fundamental consensus on the meaning of the social world that is the very precondition of conflict over the social world. In other words, for conflict over the social world to be possible, a kind of agreement is needed on the grounds of disagreement and on their modes of expression. In the political field, for example, the genesis of that sub-universe of the social world that is the field of high public office may be seen as the gradual development of a kind of orthodoxy, a set of rules of the game that are broadly laid down, on the basis of which a communication is established within the social world that may be a communication in and through conflict. To extend this definition, we can say that the state is the principle of the organization of consent as adhesion to the social order, to the fundamental principles of the social order, that it is the foundation, not necessarily of a consensus, but of the very existence of exchanges that lead to a dissension.

This procedure is a little dangerous, in that it may appear to go back to what is the initial definition of the state, the definition that states give themselves and that was repeated in certain classical theories such as those of Hobbes and Locke, the state in this initial belief being an institution designed to serve the common good, the government serving the good of the people. To a certain extent, the state would be a neutral site or, more exactly – to use Leibniz’s analogy according to which God is the geometral of all antagonistic perspectives – the point of view overlooking all points of view, which is no longer a point of view since it is in relation to it that all points of view are organized. This view of the state as a quasi-God underlies the tradition of classical theory, and is the basis of the spontaneous sociology of the state that is expressed in what is sometimes called administrative science, that is, the discourse that agents of the state produce about the state, a veritable ideology of public service and public good.

The Marxist tradition

This ordinary representation that my definition would appear to repeat – though you will see it is very different in reality – is opposed in a whole series of traditions, particularly the Marxist tradition, by an antagonistic representation that is a kind of reversal of the primary definition: the state is not an apparatus oriented to the common good, it is an apparatus of constraint, of maintenance of public order but to the benefit of the dominant. In other words, the Marxist tradition does not pose the problem of the existence of the state, resolving it right from the start by defining the functions it fulfils; from Marx to Gramsci, to Althusser and beyond, it always insists on characterizing the state by what it does, and by the people for whom it does what it does, but without investigating the actual structure of the mechanisms deemed to produce its foundation. Clearly, it is possible to emphasize more strongly the economic functions of the state or its ideological functions: to speak of ‘hegemony’ (Gramsci)5 or ‘ideological state apparatus’ (Althusser);6 but the accent is always placed on the functions, and the question of the being and acting of this thing designated as the state is sidestepped.

It is at this point that the difficult questions arise. This critical view of the state is often accepted without discussion. If it is easy to say easy things about the state, it is because, both by position and by tradition (I have in mind, for example, Alain’s famous book Le Citoyen contre les pouvoirs),7 the producers and receivers of discourse on the state like to have a somewhat anarchistic disposition, a disposition of socially established rebellion against authority. I have in mind, for example, certain types of theories that denounce discipline and constraint, and enjoy great success, even being destined for eternal success because they fall in with adolescent rebellion against constraints and disciplines, and flatter an initial disposition towards institutions, what I call an anti-institutional mood,8 which is particularly strong at certain historic moments and in certain social groups. Owing to this fact, they are unconditionally accepted, whereas in reality, I would say, they are only the pure and simple reversal of the ordinary definition, having in common with this definition that they reduce the question of the state to the question of function, substituting for the divine state a diabolical state, substituting for ‘optimistic functionalism’ – the state as instrument of consensus, as a neutral site on which conflicts are managed – a diabolical state, diabolus in machina, a state that always operates by what I call a ‘pessimistic...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.5.2018
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Archäologie
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Vor- und Frühgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Staat / Verwaltung
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Schlagworte: Anthropologie • Anthropology • Political Science • Political Systems • Politikwissenschaft • Politische Systeme • Social & Cultural Anthropology • Sociology, political theory, the state • Soziale u. kulturelle Anthropologie
• ISBN-10: 1-5095-3391-5 / 1509533915
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3391-6 / 9781509533916