Bourdieu (on) From Neokantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory.pdf

Paul Redding

Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian

Critical Social Theory

ABSTRACT

This paper challenges the commonly made claim that

the work of Pierre Bourdieu is fundamentally anti -Hegelian

in orientation. In contrast, it argues that the development

of Bourdieu’s work from its earliest structuralist through

its later ‘post-structuralist’ phase is better described in

terms of a shift from a late nineteenth century neo -

Kantian to a distinctly Hegelian post -Kantian outlook. In

his break with structuralism, Bourdieu appealed to a bod-

ily based ‘logic of practice’ to explain the binaristic logic

of Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist analyses of myth. Effectively

working within the tradition of the Durkheimian approach

to symbolic classiﬁcation, Lévi-Strauss had inherited

Durkheim’s distinctly neo-Kantian understanding of the

role of categories in experience and action—an account

that conﬂated two forms of representation—‘intuitions’

and ‘concepts—that Kant himself had held distinct.

Bourdieu’s appeal to the role of the body’s dispositional

habitus can be considered as a retrieval of Hegel’s earlier

quite different reworking of Kant’s intuition-concept dis-

tinction in terms of distinct ‘logics’ with different forms

of ‘negation’. Bourdieu commonly acknowledged the par-

allels of his analyses of social life to those of Hegel, but

opposed Hegelianism because he believed that Hegel

had remained entrapped within the dynamics of

mythopoeic thought. In contrast, Durkheim and Lévi-

Strauss, he claimed, by instituting a science of myth, had

Critical Horizons 6:1 (2005)

broken with it.This criticism of Hegel, however, relies on an understanding of his philosophy that

has been rejected by many contemporary Hegel scholars, and without it, the gap separating

Hegel and Bourdieu narrows dramatically.

KEY WORDS: Bourdieu, Hegel, Durkheim, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Neo-Kantianism

Initially, the idea of linking the work of French ethnologist-sociologist Pierre

Bourdieu to Hegel may seem surprising. Having emerged from the generation

of structuralist thinkers in the 1960’s, Bourdieu can thereby be regarded to

have come from an intellectual movement that virtually deﬁned itself in oppo-

sition to an ‘Hegelian humanism’ exempliﬁed by Sartre. For Bourdieu, as for

contemporaries like Foucault or Althusser, approaches to the history of the

sciences found in epistemological thinkers such as Gaston Bachelard and

George Canguilhem 1 replaced that humanistic variant of the Hegelian story

of the teleological emergence of the essentially universal human subject.

Moreover, in ethnography itself, Lévi-Strauss had explicitly opposed his struc-

turalist thought to Sartre’s version of Hegelian humanism, 2 and identiﬁed his

approach as a type of “Kantianism without a transcendental subject.” 3

Indeed, along with Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu can be thought of as continuing

some of the features of late nineteenth-century French neo-Kantianism, thereby

establishing a route ‘back to Kant’ which largely bypassed Hegel and other

German idealists. Crucially, both Lévi-Strauss and Bourdieu were inﬂuenced

by Émile Durkheim whose work showed strong neo-Kantian inﬂuences. 4 And

while Bourdieu’s ‘structuralism’ might have been relatively short lived, 5 his

‘post-structuralist’ work looks no friendlier to Hegelianism. 6 What we might

regard as the ﬁrst recognisably ‘Bourdieuan’ work, Esquisse d’une Théorie de

la Pratique , published in 1972, 7 had been conceived as a critique of Lévi-

Strauss, but with this Bourdieu seemed to deepen his earlier critique of the

‘academic aristocratism’ of any totalising philosophy, drawing upon further

types of philosophical ‘anti-philosophers’—‘ordinary language’ philosophers

such as Wittgenstein and Austin, for example—who seem equally distant

from Hegel’s systematising. Even the Marxist elements in Bourdieu’s work

are commonly said to have a strikingly anti-Hegelian nature. 8

After his turn away from structuralism, Bourdieu criticised Lévi-Strauss’

approach as suffering from a tendency to intellectualise the objects of its own

ﬁeld of study—the ﬁeld of mythopoeic thought . Indeed, structuralism was seen

184 • Paul Redding

as suffering from a form of logicism akin to Hegel’s, Bourdieu comparing Lévi-

Strauss’ inquiry into the “universal laws which govern the unconscious

activities of the mind” to Hegel’s account of the universal spirit that “thinks

itself.” 9 While Lévi-Strauss had looked to the structure of myth and ritual to

disclose the universal structures of human thought, from Bourdieu’s post-

structuralist perspective, an examination of the context within which

mythopoeic thought was enacted revealed its ‘logic’ to be generated not from

some underlying formal structure, nor from any mythopoeic version of ‘tran-

scendental consciousness’, but from an ensemble of unconscious practically

oriented bodily dispositions—what Bourdieu termed ‘habitus’—responsive

to the demands of varying and particular circumstances within a socially

encoded environment. 10

Bourdieu’s move beyond structuralism can easily be seen as strengthening

and deepening certain Kantian dimensions of his thought, as he was now

concerned with criticising the hypostatisation of a form of thought—that of the

scientiﬁc ethnologist—beyond the conditions of its own functioning. Like the

pre-Copernican cosmologist, the scholastic ethnologist appeared to project

the conditions of his own experience onto the object of inquiry. Bourdieu’s

response was thus to extend Kant’s critique of pure reason into what he called

a ‘critique of scholastic reason’. And yet this familiar anti-Hegelian reading of

Bourdieu, I suggest, is confounded by the remarkable points of convergence

one ﬁnds within Bourdieu’s work—often signalled by Bourdieu himself—

with the thought of Hegel. It is such points of convergence that I want to

broach here, ﬁrst, that between Bourdieu’s ‘logic of practice’ and Hegel’s

account of the structure of what can be termed ‘immediate thought’, and

next, that between the respective accounts each give of the conditions under

which systematic ‘reﬂective’ thought can break with the socially conditioned

logic of practice. This is done not for the purpose of reducing Bourdieu’s

remarkably innovative work to the status of repetition of a thinker regarded

as having brought intellectual history to a close, but more to question the

degree to which Hegel himself can be reduced to the image of that philosopher

against which Bourdieu and his generation had reacted.

Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory • 185

I. Practical versus Theoretical Logic and the Critique of Scholastic

Reason

After his break with structuralist formalism, Bourdieu came to regard Lévi-

Strauss’ intellectualising analyses of mythopoeic thought as exemplifying a

danger implicit in the very move which liberates scientiﬁc thought from the

constraints of everyday life: the danger of a ‘scholastic forgetting’ of the his-

torical speciﬁcity of those conditions allowing the reﬂexively epistemic

orientation to the world characteristic of scholarship itself. While still main-

taining his earlier positive ‘Bachelardian’ stance towards the establishment

of the sciences in their break with the schemas of everyday life, Bourdieu’s

attitude was now tempered by a sensitivity to the ambiguity of such episte-

mological breaks: “The fundamental ambiguity of the scholastic universes and

of all their productions... lies in the fact that their apartness from the world

of production is both a liberatory break and a disconnection, a potentially

crippling separation.” 11

In order to capture the peculiarity of the theoretical attitude and the conditions

that underlie its emergence in various realms, as well as its inherent ambiguity,

Bourdieu employed the notion of the ‘ skholè ’. Exploiting the etymological

connection between scholarship and leisure, Bourdieu used this concept to

refer to those historically created social contexts, which “liberated from practical

occupations and preoccupations,” were able to provide the cultural spaces

for the development of the type of scholarly/scholastic linguistic practice. For

example, within the school it is “studious leisure” which becomes “the pre-

condition for scholastic exercises and activities removed from immediate

necessity, such as sport, play, the production and contemplation of works of

art and all forms of gratuitous speculation with no other end than themselves.”

These historically speciﬁc contexts liberating an activity from the immediate

demands of economic and social necessity in turn foster the “scholastic dis-

position which inclines it possessors to suspend the demands of the situation,

the constraints of economic and social necessity, and the urgencies it imposes

or the ends it proposes” to meet the demands of detached and disinterested

inquiry. 12

More speciﬁcally concerned with the emergence of objective thought about

the social ﬁeld , Bourdieu’s telling of the story of the epistemological rupture

is further marked by the details of his own ethnographically derived account

186 • Paul Redding

of the form of thought with which the scholarly language game breaks and

with which it is to be contrasted— mythopoeic thought . Following Durkheim

and Mauss, 13 Bourdieu understands human practices as needing the articulation

provided by socially generated symbolic systems that, in pre-modern societies,

are objectiﬁed and transmitted in ritual and myth. Such mythopoeic thought

thus reﬂects and reproduces just those types of “primitive classiﬁcation” struc-

turing social activity within pre-modern communities—those systems of

“inseparably cognitive and evaluative structures that organise perception of

the world and action in the world in accordance with the objective structures

of a given state of the social world.” 14 But going beyond Durkheim’s neo-

Kantian formalism and in the direction of Marx, Bourdieu draws attention

to the role played by such classiﬁcations in the articulation of relations of

domination . It is in virtue of the evaluative dimension of such differences insti-

tuted in the world that they thereby articulate a type of social domination

via a “symbolic violence” which constrains by neither overt force nor reason,

but by something in between. 15

The emergence of philosophy in classical Greece, which provides the skholè

with its “ideal type,” exempliﬁes such a break with systems of mythopoeic

thought. There “myths and rites ceased to be practical acts of belief... and

became instead matter for theoretical astonishment and questioning, or objects

of hermeneutic rivalry.” 16 But as an ethnologist Bourdieu was interested in the

break from mythical thought in the context of the inquiry into myth itself —a

break, he claimed, which was not achieved until the work of Durkheim and

Mauss, and, importantly, Lévi-Strauss. It was Lévi-Strauss’ achievement,

Bourdieu tells us, to have “provided the means of completing the abandonment

of recourse to the mythological mode of thought in the science of mytholo-

gies... by resolutely taking this mode of thought as his object instead of

setting it to work, as native mythologists always do, in order to provide a

mythological solution to mythological problems.” 17 And yet, as we have seen,

in his structuralist search for some universal grammar or ‘logic’ underlying

the outputs of mythical thought, Lévi-Strauss had projected onto his subjects

the disengaged dispositions of his own scholastic context—forgetting, and

thereby universalising, the historical speciﬁcity of his own intellectual practice.

Following his break with structuralism, in works like Esquisse d’une Théorie

de la Pratique and Le sens Pratique , Bourdieu attempted to reinterpret the type

Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory • 187

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