The Background

The turn of the century was the high point of my close working relations with Bourdieu and his colleagues. In 1999, I translated ‘Sur les ruses de la raison impérialiste’ (On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason) – an article that Bourdieu had co-authored with Loïc Wacquant which argued that dualistic American conceptions of race had been imposed on a Latin American situation which was multiracial. The following year, the book on Bourdieu which I had commenced for Polity Press was accepted and published by Sage. Meanwhile, I was preparing, also for publication by Sage, a four-volume collection of articles on Bourdieu's work. Bourdieu gave me access to his personal collection of secondary texts to assist me in this editorial process. In October 2000, I organised a conference on Bourdieu's work at UEL (‘Bourdieu in the 21st Century’).

This phase came to an end with Bourdieu's death in April 2002. Before his death, I had indicated that I wanted to develop a transnational project on conceptual transfer between France and the United Kingdom. This arose from my awareness, from personal experience, of the difficulties of communicating Bourdieu's ideas within the English intellectual field. He suggested that I should collaborate with Dominique Merrlié to explore, as a case study, the social conditions of the production of the work of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and of its reception in the United Kingdom. We gained a Franco-British research grant, funded by the British Academy and the CNRS, for a series of seminars which took place, alternating between France and the United Kingdom, from 2002 to 2004. In preparation for the research application, I read Lévy-Bruhl's work systematically and there were two immediate spin-offs. I translated an extract on Leibniz from Lévy-Bruhl's Allemagne depuis Leibniz (1890), and I gave a paper, in November 2001, on ‘Lévy-Bruhl's representation of Comte’ at a seminar organised by the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Maison Française, University of Oxford. Highlighting Lévy-Bruhl's account of the work of Leibniz, I first illustrated the way in which he had analysed the sociopolitical conditions of the production of philosophy in Germany in the eighteenth century.