In 1947, the Doomsday Clock was created by a group of atomic scientists to symbolise the perils facing humanity from nuclear weapons. Sixty years on, in 2007, after many readjustments, it was set at five minutes before the final bell. The reasons given by the scientists included – for the first time – new developments in the life sciences and nanotechnology, and the threat of climate change (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 17 January 2007, accessed online 3 March 2011). In 2010, with some evidence of movement towards arms and climate control, the Clock was taken back to six minutes to midnight. The scientists declared: ‘For the first time in decades we have an opportunity to free ourselves from the terror of nuclear weapons and to slow drastic changes to our shared global environment.’ They encouraged ‘scientists to continue their engagement with these issues and make their analysis widely known’, and were confident enough to assert: ‘We are poised to bend the arc of history’ (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 14 January 2010, accessed online 3 March 2011). It is highly unlikely that the atomic scientists would include historians among those ‘poised to bend the arc of history’, and even less likely that most historians would want to be included. However, this book takes the contrary view, arguing for the necessity of history as a science in a pandisciplinary response to the ongoing crisis.

The tiny spheroid that we call home hurtles through space as if there were no tomorrow. A thin surface crust covers a molten mass of which we know comparatively little. Surrounding the earth is a cocoon of atmosphere, which we understand rather better.

Recently we have learned that there may indeed be no tomorrow, since human-made changes are making an impact on the world's ecosystems that could bring to an end life as we have known it. This, in addition to the continuing possibility of a suicidal nuclear war, and the added threat of mass destruction posed by new technologies.

Earlier geological ages either predated or proceeded without significant interference from our ancestors. Respectful of nature in their own way, ‘primitive’ human beings often worshipped the sun and moon, making sacrifices to appease them or the gods of nature. The emergence of the great religions brought about change in this relationship, introducing the idea that man could, or even should, dominate nature. Confidence was even greater among some materialists. For example, the Soviet historian M. N. Pokrovsky declared in 1931: ‘It is easy to foresee that in future, when science and technique have attained to a perfection which we are as yet unable to visualise, nature will become soft wax in his [man's] hands which he will be able to cast into whatever form he chooses.’

The Crisis

In 1991, the Doomsday Clock reached a point far from midnight when a new global nuclear arms treaty was signed – 17 minutes. In 2002, however, a few months after 9/11 and the USA's withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, it advanced a full 10 minutes. Then, in 2007, it moved forwards again to 5 minutes before the fateful hour.

Sixty years after the hands of the Doomsday Clock were first set by a group of atomic scientists the threat of climate change was brought into their calculations. They called the threat of global warming a ‘second nuclear age’, asserting that the dangers posed by climate change were ‘nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons’. They continued: ‘The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause irremediable harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival.’ They concluded: ‘Not since the first atomic bombs has the world faced such perilous choices’.

Early in 2007, a group of American politicians previously supportive of nuclear weapons – Henry A. Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William J. Perry and George P. Shultz – endorsed the Reykjavik vision shared by presidents Gorbachev and Reagan for a nuclear-free world, asserting:

The deeper one penetrates the universes of Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu, the clearer it becomes: the similarities between their visions of society are striking. While the two sociologists always showed great sympathy for one another, there are no indications that they were fully aware of how fundamental the subterranean intellectual affinities were. And even though many social scientists combine a high regard for some of Elias's works with great admiration for several works by Bourdieu, thereby showing an instinctive sense of the affinities between these authors, until now it seems that no one has noticed the degree to which Bourdieu and Elias are intellectual siblings. The contributions of each has been highlighted in convincing work – in the case of Elias, for example, by Goudsblom (1987), and, in the case of Bourdieu, by the likes of Wacquant (2006). Even in such careful and judicious accounts, however, important connections between the two authors have remained either hidden or implicit. Engaging in some degree of excavation, this chapter brings to light why Bourdieu and Elias can be viewed as contributors to a single theoretical approach. The most important finding here is that both relied heavily on the same triad of core concepts, and both deployed those concepts in relentlessly relational and processual fashion. Our first goal, therefore, is to uncover these deep-seated conceptual affinities.

Our second goal is to demonstrate that, when taken together, the two authors' perspectives yield a vision more far-reaching and powerful than either considered separately.

Question: When did you start to familiarise yourself with the work of Max Weber? If I understand you correctly, this happened during your time in Algeria. What sort of texts were you reading at that time?

Pierre Bourdieu: I began with Die protestantische Ethik. During that time, I was working on a book which was intended to summarise my research on Algeria. In Die protestantische Ethik there was an abundance of things on the traditional, pre-capitalist ‘spirit’, and on economic behaviour – wonderful descriptions which were very useful and indeed quite impressive. I drew on Weber's work in order to understand the M'zab, a stretch of land in the Arabic desert, inhabited mainly by Kharijites, who are Muslims with a very ascetic – and almost ‘Puritan’ – lifestyle and whom we might want to call ‘the Protestants of Islam’, a religious current. This was really mind-boggling; this austerity with regard to sexual morals and self-discipline. At the same time, these are really prosperous and forward-looking traders; in fact, a lot of the small businesses in North Africa belong to them. I was astounded by the typically Weberian connection between religious asceticism and this very smooth adjustment to new conditions. By the way, similar to the Calvinist Puritans, these people are highly educated: they read a lot, they read the Qur'an, almost all of the children go to school, and most of them are bilingual in Arabic and French.

Introduction: The Secularisation Thesis

Whereas in recent years many of sociologists and philosophers have come to the conclusion that religion has to be taken seriously in debates about modern politics and the public sphere, such was not the case with many post-war social theorists. Louis Althusser, Luc Boltanski, Ralf Dahrendorf, Norbert Elias, Anthony Giddens, David Harvey, Edward Said and Göran Therborn either ignored religion or paid little attention to it, rather than treating it as a central aspect of modern society. Michel Foucault was probably alone in his consistent interest in religion – for example, in his essays on medieval Christian teaching on chastity and in his view of the Iranian Revolution as a form of spiritual politics. On a more personal note, he spoke about ‘spirituality’, that is, the ‘search, practice and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth’ (Foucault, 2005 [2001]: 15). The majority of public intellectuals on the Left in the post-war period ignored religion as a spent force in modernity. What has changed? The obvious answer is that there are various transformations of social and political life that have placed religion as an institution at the centre of modern society. Religion now appears to be closely related to identity politics and has been the ideological driving force behind social movements such as Solidarity, ‘engaged Buddhism’ and Hindu nationalism.

This chapter makes a comparison, which from a sociological perspective might appear a little surprising: it is between Pierre Bourdieu's and Friedrich Nietzsche's respective conceptions of ‘power’ and ‘taste’. The aim is to show that there is an interesting resemblance between the two with regard to these conceptions in general, and to ‘struggle for power’, ‘ressentiment’ and ‘will to power’ in particular, and thus to shed light on some key aspects of Bourdieu's thinking. The order of the dramatis personae in this analysis is no accident: Bourdieu and Nietzsche. This alludes to the fact that the discussion that follows is primarily about what lies behind Bourdieu's sociological, rather than Nietzsche's philosophical, conceptions of taste and power. Thus, Nietzsche is read, first and foremost, from a sociological perspective.

Pierre Bourdieu's Taste

There were no sociological disputes about the concept of taste before the publication of Pierre Bourdieu's studies on the subject.

Unsurprisingly, the Second World War had separate and distinctive consequences for different national traditions of sociology. After the War, the dominant and arguably most successful of the Western democracies emerged in North America, and its sociological traditions assumed a celebratory and often triumphalist perspective on modernisation. The defeat of the fascist nations – notably Germany, Italy, and Japan – seemed to demonstrate the superiority of Western liberal democratic systems, and North American sociologists took the lead in developing theories of development and modernisation that were optimistic and forward-looking. The examples are numerous, but we might mention Daniel Lerner's The Passing of Traditional Society (1958) or S. M. Lipset's The First New Nation (1963). At the centre of this post-war tradition stood The Social System of Talcott Parsons (1951), which involved the notion that systems could continuously and successfully adapt to environmental challenges through the master processes of differentiation and adaptive upgrading. In many of his short essays, he analysed the problems of German and Japanese modernisation and saw the United States of America as a social system that had successfully adapted to the rise of industrial modernisation. In its assessment of modern society, Parsons's sociology avoided the pessimistic vision of early critical theory – epitomised in Adorno's analysis of mass society – because he looked forward to America as a ‘lead society’ in large-scale social development (see Holton and Turner, 1986).

Introduction

This chapter examines the transformation of culture in modern society by drawing upon the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Theodor W. Adorno. Far from intending to embrace the entire complexity of Bourdieusian and Adornian thought, the analysis focuses on some key dimensions that are particularly relevant to understanding the relationship between modern culture and modern society. This study seeks to show that comprehending the transformation of culture in the modern world requires taking into account the transformation of society as a whole. In order to demonstrate this, the chapter is structured as follows.

The first section briefly elucidates the concept of culture. Given the central importance of the concept of culture for the analysis of this chapter, it seems sensible to clarify its different meanings. If the concept of culture can be used and defined in several ways, it is necessary to specify with which of its various meanings the present study is mainly concerned.

The second section centres upon Bourdieu's analysis of culture. More specifically, the Bourdieusian approach to culture allows us to understand the transformation of culture in modern society in terms of three significant tendencies: (i) the differentiation of culture, (ii) the commodification of culture, and (iii) the classification of culture. Taken together, these three social processes are indicative of the complexification of culture in the modern world, which manifests itself in the emergence of an increasingly powerful ‘cultural economy’.

In the mid-1980s, Axel Honneth – successor to Jürgen Habermas, and now considered the most prominent representative of the Frankfurt School's third generation – made an important contribution to the sociophilosophical reading of Pierre Bourdieu's work that fundamentally shaped its German reception (see Behr, 2001). This contribution is marked by a clear ambivalence. On the one hand, it is obvious that it was in no way gratuitous. Honneth knew from the beginning that Bourdieu's work was to play a key role in his own project to renew the tradition of critical theory (Honneth, Basaure, Reemtsma and Willig, 2009). At the centre of this project was a reappropriation and revitalisation of the Hegelian concept of the ‘struggle for recognition’ (Honneth, 1995 [1992]; 2000; 2003; 2007 [2000]). On the other hand, Honneth's early texts, which contribute to the German reception of Bourdieu, are eminently critical of Bourdieu's work. In a monographic article presented in the early 1980s, Honneth (1984) advances the critique that Bourdieu's social theory tends to ignore the normative structuring of social life and instead takes up a utilitarian, strategic understanding of social action. This charge similarly dominates the interview Honneth and his colleagues conducted with Bourdieu, which was published two years later (Bourdieu, Honneth, Kocyba and Schwibs, 1986). I want to argue that this ambivalence cuts across Honneth's entire relationship with Bourdieu's work. Whilst Honneth rejects what he considers to be the socio-ontological foundations of Bourdieu's sociological theory, he draws upon the Bourdieusian approach and considers it as an expression of an exemplary sociology.

Derek Robbins states categorically that ‘[t]here are no grounds for considering Bourdieu was ever a Marxist’ (2006: 513), whilst Brubaker argues that although Bourdieu might appear to be in the Marxist tradition, his critiques of Marxism should make us think otherwise (1985: 761). Although I shall be taking issue with both of these conclusions, I do not want to claim the opposite: that Marx alone influenced him. Bourdieu was unusually inventive in drawing also on Weber, Durkheim, Husserl, Mauss, Elias, and Pascal, not to mention others. Given more space, I would draw out all of these different strands in the texture of his work, whilst acknowledging that, at his best, his syntheses possess a masterly originality. Having rejected ‘histmat’ or Stalinist orthodoxy (Bourdieu, 1990: 3), however, it is my contention that Bourdieu is one of the great heirs of the Western Marxist tradition. It was not simply a youthful flash in the pan that led him to suggest his lycée students read The Communist Manifesto (Lescourret, 2008: 65–66).

My general proposal is this: a strong case can be made for the influence of Marx on Bourdieu's early writings. A more intricate case needs to be made for the view that Bourdieu continued to be influenced profoundly by Marx, despite the development of his distinctive language: the now-familiar concepts of habitus, field, doxa, allodoxia, and so on.

Introduction

This chapter will examine the question of whether Bourdieu's social theory can be mobilised to understand our recent and ongoing global economic crisis. This may seem an odd question to pose on many fronts, not least because – and with the exception of markets for normatively defined cultural goods – Bourdieu's corpus is rarely, if ever, called upon to engage with strictly economic processes and formations. And this is the case despite the fact that Bourdieu (2005 [2000]) dedicated a whole volume to the study of the social structures of the economy and despite the fact that in his later, arguably more polemical, work (Bourdieu, 1998; 1999 [1993]; 2003 [2001]) he directly engaged with the political economy of neo-liberalism, mounting a sustained critique of what he termed the ‘tyranny of the neo-liberal market’.

Yet, while this is so, Bourdieu's social theory is widely critiqued for its lack of traction in regard to economic processes, not least because of its inability to grasp the specificity of capitalist economic relations. Craig Calhoun (1993), for example, has argued that despite the emphasis we find in Bourdieu on the forms of capital (Bourdieu, 1986), what is striking is that nowhere in Bourdieu's social theory do we find an elaboration of the specificity of capitalist capital. Thus, while Bourdieu understands the various capitals he describes as comprising accumulated labour, he fails to specify what differentiates capitalist capital from such labour.

Between Genetic Structuralism and Phenomenology: The Complex Constitution of Habitus

For nearly thirty years now, the critical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu has been used in an increasingly large number of studies in the social sciences. It is remarkable, however, that it has had a rather weak impact on my own field of research: the study of new social movements. This chapter argues that the reason for this anomaly lies with Bourdieu's theory of habitus (a central element of Bourdieusian thought) and the particular problems that this theory poses for researchers of new social movements. As original and powerful as it can be, the theory of habitus is, first and foremost, a theory of reproduction and determination. As such, its ability to help us to understand the creativity and radical innovations of the actors who constitute new social movements is severely limited. Thus, whilst immersed in my own research, I found that I had to choose between two options: one option was to abandon the Bourdieusian approach to the social all together; the other option was to stay within the Bourdieusian paradigm and, in the light of its substantial shortcomings, seek to transcend its limitations. Preferring to pursue the latter – somewhat more optimistic – project, the question to be confronted was whether or not it is possible to move Bourdieu's paradigm forward, beyond its conventional applications, in order to render it operational in other areas, such as my own, where it is has not contributed a great deal.