Pierre Bourdieu's conception of habitus marks a theoretical step which no adequate understanding of social reality can ignore. By introducing habitus, Bourdieu is able both to integrate and to transcend major insights of the linguistic turn in philosophy, most prominently the idea that conscious intentional understanding necessarily relies on a host of implicit, practical, and holistic background assumptions which constitute meaning while being themselves unrepresented (Searle, 1989). The concept of habitus incorporates this idea since it shows that individual agency and its self-understanding are constituted by relying on an acquired social sense, the cognitive habitus, which defines how an agent understands, acts, and perceives itself and its environment. At the same time, it transcends the philosophical thematisation of a constitutive yet implicit background because it makes this hidden continent of pre-understanding susceptible to empirical-analytic social science.

This major step is hailed in traditional social theory as well as by Bourdieu himself as the mediation of agency and structure. It consists in reconstructing how specific social environments (that is, the structural conditions of agency) relate to and shape the internal sense of intentional agency (that is, the individual first-person dimension of agency) (Bourdieu, 1977 [1972]; 1990 [1980]). Habitus connects the two via a realm of pre-structured, schematised modes of understanding that define the specific cognitive accomplishments that any particular agent is capable of performing.

Marx

The Question of Anthropological Distinctiveness: The Production of the Means of Subsistence as the Foundation of Society

Let me begin by quoting Marx from the German Ideology:

From a materialist point of view, the main criterion for distinguishing one species from another is its way of asserting itself as a living species. Thus, one can distinguish humans from animals on the basis of their capacity to distinguish themselves from other species through the physical organisation of their life forms. This distinctiveness, which cannot be brought into being by reference to an external force – such as consciousness, thought, or religious sentiment – is rooted in a given activity, namely in production, that is, in the production of the means of subsistence. The human body is designed to produce, and reproduce through its production, and thereby ensure its own existence. As the existential importance of the verb ‘to produce’ suggests, anthropological specificity is derived from human productivity: in the last instance, to be able to produce means to be able to produce the means of subsistence.

In the French edition of The Weight of the World, Bourdieu contends that the goal of his critical sociology is to ‘open up possibilities for rational action to unmake or remake what history has made’ (1999 [1993]: 187). But what is ‘rational action’ in politics? And what potential contribution can intellectuals make to it? This last question is the one that I would like to address here, taking Bourdieu's own answers to it as my starting point. The aim will not be to analyse the concrete orientation of his public interventions, but instead to understand the type of articulation between political life and the intellectual world that he conceptualised. I have no philological ambitions of retracing Bourdieu's trajectory from the 1960s onwards. My intention is to focus on his theorisation of these issues during the last period of his life, from the moment he committed himself increasingly to the public realm (the turning point here is symbolised by the publication in 1993 of The Weight of the World, whose echo outside the academic world was considerable).

The purpose of this contribution is to explore historically the relationship between the social theory emerging at the Centre de sociologie européenne in Paris during the 1960s and the Parisian events of May 1968. Adopting the terminology of an article of 1981 by Pierre Bourdieu himself (‘Décrire et prescrire. Note sur les conditions de possibilité et les limites de l'efficacité politique’ [‘Describing and Prescribing. A Note on the Conditions of Possibility and the Limits of Political Effectiveness’] (Bourdieu, 1981), my purpose is to consider in what ways the work of the Centre de sociologie européenne could be said to describe or prescribe the May ‘events’. This consideration is a vehicle for an assessment of the diverging positions of Aron, Bourdieu and Passeron at the time, particularly by reference to their responses to the work of Weber.

The Centre de sociologie européenne was established by Raymond Aron in 1960. I shall explore the development of Aron's view of sociology in the context of his prior commitment to engaged historical observation and then consider his influence on Bourdieu and Passeron. My purpose is to ask what it meant (and might still mean) to regard objective phenomena or events as either social or political.

Mise-En-Scène

Raymond Aron was born in 1905 and was one of a famous cohort of entrants to the École normale supérieure in 1924, which also included Jean-Paul Sartre. His training was predominantly philosophical. In 1930, he obtained a post as Teaching Assistant at the University of Cologne.

For lack of being able to offer here a systematic comparison between Bourdieu's sociology and the thought of Durkheim – which would require an historicalanalytic monograph capable of reconstituting the double chain, social and intellectual, of the ramifying causations that link them to each other and to their respective milieu – I would like, by way of selective soundings, to bring out four of the pillars that support their common base: namely, (1) the fierce attachment to rationalism, (2) the refusal of pure theory and the stubborn defence of the undividedness of social science, (3) the relation to the historical dimension and to the discipline of history, and (4) the recourse to ethnology as a privileged device for ‘indirect experimentation’.

I am quite conscious of the fact that such an exercise can all too easily take a scholastic turn and fall into two equally reductive deviations, the one consisting in mechanically deducing Bourdieu from Durkheim so as to reduce him to the rank of an avatar, the other in projecting back the theses dear to Bourdieu into Durkheim's work so as to attest to their intellectual nobility. Its aim is to bring out some of the distinctive features of that French School of sociology, which endures and enriches itself at the cost of sometimesunexpected metamorphoses.

Bourdieu's work was deeply moulded by the national intellectual milieu in which it developed, that of France in the late 1940s and 1950s, a milieu characterised by disputes between phenomenologists and structuralists. But it is not this national and cultural dimension that distinguishes Bourdieu's writings from those of other ‘grand theorists’. Habermas and Giddens, for example, owed as much to the academic or political context of their home countries. What set Bourdieu's approach apart from that of his German and British ‘rivals’ was a significantly stronger linkage of theoretical and empirical knowledge. Bourdieu was first and foremost an empirical sociologist, that is, a sociologist who developed and constantly refined his theoretical concepts on the basis of his empirical work – with all the advantages and disadvantages that theoretical production of this kind entails. We shall have more to say about this later. Bourdieu is thus to be understood primarily not as a theorist but as a cultural sociologist who systematically stimulated the theoretical debate through his empirical work.

Pierre Bourdieu was born in 1930 and is therefore of the same generation as Habermas and Luhmann. The fact that Bourdieu came from a modest background and grew up in the depths of provincial France is extremely important to understanding his work. Bourdieu himself repeatedly emphasised the importance of his origins: ‘I spent most of my youth in a tiny and remote village of Southwestern France […].

Approaching Pierre Bourdieu

Those who are unfamiliar, or barely familiar, with the writings of Pierre Bourdieu will find a useful and comprehensive introduction to his work in the opening chapter, entitled ‘Between Structuralism and Theory of Practice: The Cultural Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu’. In it, Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl provide us with a clear and accessible overview of some of the main philosophical and sociological themes that run through Bourdieu's writings. Joas and Knöbl centre their analysis on five interrelated concepts that play a pivotal role in Bourdieu's work: the concepts of (1) practice, (2) action, (3) the social, (4) cultural sociology, and (5) social science.

(1) The authors examine Bourdieu's concept of practice by focusing on one of his most influential early works, namely his Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977 [1972]). As explained by Joas and Knöbl, Bourdieu's theory of practice is based on a sympathetic but critical revision of Lévi-Strauss's anthropological structuralism through the proposal of an alternative, somewhat refined, form of structuralism, commonly described as ‘genetic’ or ‘constructivist’ structuralism. According to Joas and Knöbl, the paradigmatic transition from Lévi-Strauss's ‘anthropological structuralism’ to Bourdieu's ‘genetic structuralism’ contains a number of significant presuppositional shifts. (i) The shift from ‘rule following’ to ‘rule breaking’ is motivated by the insight that social actors do not always follow the rules imposed upon them by their social environment: the relative unpredictability of society is due to the ineluctable power of human agency.

In 1962 a gathering of Soviet historians at the Academy of Sciences chose the fiftieth anniversary of Pravda's founding to call attention to certain shortcomings in Soviet scholarship concerning V. I. Lenin's leadership of the famous Bolshevik daily. It was noted that although a considerable amount had been written on Lenin's literary contributions to the paper, insufficient attention had been paid to the problem of its political leadership during the crucial two years before the war. This observation heralded the publication of several detailed studies that predictably found that Stalin, Molotov and certain other ‘conciliatory elements’ within Pravda's editorial board had hindered Lenin's efforts to complete the work of the Prague Conference in equating the Bolshevik faction with the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. These studies minimized, however, the degree of his dissatisfaction with the paper and the hostility which his efforts to control Pravda engendered among its editors. Moreover, no Soviet historians and very few of their Western counterparts questioned the basic assumptions that Lenin was instrumental in founding Pravda and that through it he stimulated and directed the growing unrest that characterized Russia's pre-war industrial society. The reticence of Soviet historians to question the ‘Pravda legend’ might be understandable. But it is harder to explain why Western scholars ignored the wealth of material found in Lenin's published correspondence and in the resolutions of his Central Committee that would indicate that the relations between the Bolshevik leader and his famous newspaper were anything but smooth and harmonious.

One topic the editors of the first four editions of V. I. Lenin's ‘collected works’ carefully avoided was the Bolshevik leader's testimony before the Provisional Government's Extraordinary Investigatory Commission on 26 May 1917. No mention of the commission or of Lenin's nine-page written deposition to it is to be found in these editions. In 1962 the editors of the fifth edition, his supposedly Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, were only slightly less reticent. The deposition itself is absent from the text of volume 32, which covers the period from 2 May to 8 July 1917, and his appearance before the commission is not included in the detailed ‘chronology of the life and activity of V. I. Lenin’ at the end of the volume. Buried in one of the endnotes, however, are three short paragraphs from his testimony in which he sought to explain his actions in 1914 when he defended Roman Malinovskii, a member of his Central Committee and the leader of the Bolshevik fraction in the Fourth State Duma, against widespread rumours that he was an agent of the tsarist police. The fact that Lenin's judgement in 1914 was proven wrong when the police files were opened in March 1917 explains why the original deposition and a contemporary copy of it remained unpublished in two Soviet archives for more than seventy years. Under the influence of glasnost', this ‘blank spot’ in Lenin's biography was finally illuminated in 1990 and 1991 with the publication of both documents in two leading Soviet journals.

One of the occupational hazards of living and working in a capital city such as Ottawa is ‘the diplomatic lunch’. In 1978 I was invited by a Second Secretary at the Soviet Embassy to join him for a meal at the ‘Auberge Cossack’, a nondescript and short-lived restaurant which served Russian food at French prices. After the borsch, I was asked the usual question of ‘what are you working on now?’ I responded that as a journal editor I had little time for anything else but I had recently published a short biography of Roman Malinovskii. ‘Malinovskii’, said my host, his eyes aglimmer, ‘a very fishy business’. Indeed it was. Whether he knew it or not, he was echoing words spoken by V. I. Lenin some sixty years earlier shortly after Malinovskii had been executed in Moscow for ‘injuring and discrediting the revolution and its leaders in the eyes of the working masses’.

It soon became apparent that my Soviet friend knew only the vague outline of Malinovskii's extraordinary career: that he had been a leading member of the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik Party, a Social Democratic deputy to the Fourth State Duma, and concurrently an agent of the tsarist secret police. After I had filled in some of the details, he asked if he could borrow my book. Reluctantly, since I had but two copies, I agreed and he promised to return it in a couple of weeks.

The splendid success which attended the public presentation of the films, which I called Pearls and Savages, the picture records of my last expedition to Torres Strait … and Papua … has encouraged me to make another visit to this latter colony. My object primarily is to explore Western Papua – that unknown stretch lying west of the Kikori River to the Dutch boundary and extending from the coast to the old German boundary. … It is also my desire to further augment Pearls and Savages by eliminating scenic sections and replacing them with sensational and unique matter. My object in so doing being to exploit the films throughout the world and by thus doing, secure sufficient capital as will enable me to equip and set out on expeditions to various places without either government or private subsidy. This at once places my operations and movements beyond public criticism, and sets me entirely free to prosecute any programme I might feel inclined to embark upon. …

Owing to the impenetrable nature of jungles, swamps, mountains and rivers, the characteristic topography of Western Papua, I decided to undertake and carry out my work of survey chiefly from the air. … My opinion is that exploration of such a land can only be effectively and practically undertaken by aeroplane or seaplane. I placed my plans before Mr Lebbeus Hordern of Sydney and of whom I can only speak in eulogy.

10 November 1912

Temperature at midnight: –12°

After numerous attempts to push forward the sledging section of the expedition, we have at last been able to make a start. The continuous blizzard conditions have every evidence of breaking up or at least abating. … Our party left the hut at 12.30 p.m. Robert Bage in command, Eric N. Webb, magnetician, and myself, general handyman and photographic. It is our intention to steer magnetic south, reaching a point, as near as possible, to the south magnetic pole. … Our supporting party … are to proceed inland 100 miles, if possible. .… The provisions of our supports and our own are ample for nine weeks sledging, enabling us to return to the hut about the 15th January. Arriving at the Five Mile Depot … we met Dr Mawson, Mertz and Ninnis with the dogs. I took some cinefilm of the party, also a few snaps and after a hearty handshake and good wishes on both sides we bid farewell. … After ‘The Five Mile’, our way lay up a steep slope. Going was very hard, and … we fell through many crevasses to our waists, but without any serious mishap. …

11 November 1912

… We slept poorly owing to the novelty of our surroundings and also the excitement in pushing out into new fields. The wind was freshening and shortly after starting, snow began to fall.

Frank Hurley is best known today as a photographer and filmmaker, and it has become common to refer to his major works by the titles of his documentary films: The Home of the Blizzard, In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice, Sir Ross Smith's Flight and Pearls and Savages. But Hurley did not work in a single medium: he was an old-fashioned showman whose repertoire included both traditional and modern media, which he used in both old and new ways. The shows he put on at the height of his fame in the 1910s and 1920s were not documentary films in the modern sense, but complex multimedia performances that he called ‘synchronized lecture entertainments’. They used a combination of photographic exhibition, saturation newspaper coverage, the presence of a celebrity lecturer or ‘platform personality’, silent cinema projection, coloured glass lantern slides, live musical accompaniment, themed theatre decorations, and mainstream book publication, all ‘tied in’ to achieve maximum advertising exposure. The performances were entertaining as well as educational, drawing as much attention to their own attractions as to the events they purported to represent. There was about them a sense of self-promotion and opportunistic contrivance that sometimes attracted criticism: they smacked of what contemporary pressmen called stunts. Hurley's shows toured Australia's capital cities and regional towns and they often took place simultaneously overseas by arrangement with various entertainment agencies in New Zealand, Great Britain, Europe, the United States and Canada.

The Sixth Party Conference held in Prague in January 1912 was a watershed in the history of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDRP). Prior to this gathering, many party members had hoped that divisive factionalism, which had begun with the Menshevik-Bolshevik split at the Second Congress in 1903, could be cured, and that the two groups could exploit in concert the growing worker unrest in Russia. Social Democrats, particularly rank and file members in the underground, were encouraged by the results of the ‘Unification’ Congress held in Stockholm in 1906 and the ‘Unification’ Plenum of the Central Committee which met in Paris in January 1910. In each instance, the émigré leaders were forced to acknowledge the principle of party unity and to agree to work within common leadership bodies. But in 1912 this façade of unity collapsed. The two factions met separately that year – the Bolsheviks in Prague during January, the Mensheviks in Vienna during August – and the outcome was in effect the creation of two separate Social Democratic parties, each with its own leadership bodies, programme and contacts with the underground. Never again would the two factions meet together. From 1912 to 1917, instead of working in concert for the overthrow of the autocracy, they were in competition for worker support. The ultimate winner of the contest was V. I. Lenin and his Bolshevik Party. Many of the reasons for his triumph can be found in the manner in which he called the Prague Conference, the resolutions which it passed, and the reorganization which it achieved.

3 December 1919

… The last night of the Sydney performance was given to a crammed house, Kings Cross, there being over 2200 filling seats, stairs, and standing. The story which all seem to say is unique and thrilling was received magnificently. It is some reward speaking to a couple of thousand upturned faces all eager, interested and intent. In these big theatres crammed with all classes, one does not hear a sound. All seem breathless. It is great. Tomorrow we begin the interstate tour. I take as assistant lecturer, Mazengarb and O'Shea, operator.

4 December 1919

… Left Sydney 3.30 a.m. by Brisbane Express. Tony and Matron O'Connor down to see me off. Our cases narrowly escaped catching the train owing to the faulty transport arrangements of Australasian Films. It was with some feelings of relief when we drew away from Sydney. The season has been an arduous one and not without some worry. It has, however, been a phenomenal success.

5 December 1919

Crossed into Queensland 9.15 a.m. Country drought stricken and in pitiable state…Arrived, Brisbane 6.40 and to Australian Hotel, a passable house with good table, small rooms and no pretty waitresses or maids. … Evening, the Union Theatre's publicity 'bug', Holt, carried me off to the Mail office where I had to give a column of my wretched experiences and adventures – which just now are becoming a bugbear. …