ARTICLE
The strength of weak programs in cultural sociology:
A critique of Alexander’s critique of Bourdieu
David Gartman
Published online: 14 July 2007
# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007
Abstract Jeffrey Alexander’s recent book on cultural sociology argues that sociologists
must grant the realm of ideas autonomy to determine behavior, unencumbered by
interference from instrumental or material factors. He criticizes the sociology of Pierre
Bourdieu as “weak” for failing to give autonomy to culture by reducing it to self-interested
behavior that immediately reflects class position. However, Alexander’s arguments
seriously distort and misstate Bourdieu’s theory, which provides for the relative autonomy
of culture through the concepts of habitus and field. Because habitus is a set of durable
dispositions conditioned by past structures, it may contradict the changed structures of the
present. Further, the influence of the habitus is always mediated by the structure and
strategies of the field of contest in which it is deployed, so that the same habitus may
motivate different actions in different circumstances. However, Alexander is correct to
argue that in Bourdieu’s theory culture generally serves to reproduce, not contradict social
structures. Yet Bourdieu addresses this and other problems in his later work, in which he
argues for the existence of certain cultural universals transcending particular structures.
Introduction
In his recent book entitled The Meanings of Social Life, Jeffrey Alexander ambitiously
seeks to redefine cultural sociology and, in the process, the entire discipline. Abandoning
his earlier efforts to broaden functionalism into a multidimensional theory, he now attempts
to narrow all sociology to the single dimension of culture. In his new vision of the
discipline, all roads to understanding human behavior go through culture, the preeminent
and ultimate determinant of action. His efforts are part of a larger revival of sociological
interest in culture over the last decade or so. But Alexander’s intervention into this rich and
Theor Soc (2007) 36:381–413
DOI 10.1007/s11186-007-9038-9
D. Gartman (*)
Department of Sociology, Anthropology & Social Work, University of South Alabama,
Mobile, AL 36688-0002, USA
e-mail: dgartman@usouthal.edu
eclectic field of scholarship seeks to narrow it to a single, impoverished vision of the
relation of symbols and ideas to social life.
Instead of congenially sowing his conceptual seeds among the diverse flora of the
already well-tilled field of cultural sociology, Alexander practices a slash-and-burn strategy.
In his first chapter, entitled “The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology,” he hastily hacks
down most of the established traditions of research in the field, refusing to share ground
with the weak and ill-bred. His strong program’s defining criterion, which Alexander
ruthlessly wields as an ax to clear the field of competitors, is an insistence on cultural
autonomy. Nothing but the pure species of unadulterated determination of behavior by
collective emotions and ideas will grow in his field of cultural sociology, because, in his
words, “it is such subjective and internal feelings that so often seem to rule the world”
(Alexander 2003, p 5). All mongrel and hybrid approaches to culture that bear the minutest
taint of the objective or material are declared “weak,” then summarily mowed down and set
ablaze. The Gramsci-inspired Birmingham School of Stuart Hall and others is declared a
“failure” for its inability “to grasp the nettle of cultural autonomy” (p 17). Michel
Foucault’s binding of discourse to power is said to leave no room for understanding how an
autonomous cultural realm provides for the transcendental goals of social life. And the
production of culture perspective, as exemplified in the work of Wendy Griswold and
Robert Wuthnow, is dismissed as reductionist because of its aim “to explain away culture as
the product of sponsoring institutions, elites or interests” (p 20).
Given his strong-program demand for analytic autonomy of symbols and ideas from
outside determination, it is not surprising that Alexander also tries to clear the cultural field
of the contributions of one of the most commanding contemporary figures addressing
cultural issues, Pierre Bourdieu. After all, the French sociologist seeks to show that cultural
practices and ideas are inextricably and complexly intertwined with the competition for
power and material resources. But perhaps in recognition of the enormous power and scope
of Bourdieu’s work, Alexander is not content with the cursory blows with which he
dispatches other competitors for valued ground in the field of cultural sociology. Some
years before his recent redefinition of the field, he undertook a careful and sustained assault
on Bourdieu’s cultural theory in an almost book-length essay subtitled “The Failed
Synthesis of Pierre Bourdieu.” It is now clear that this 1995 attack was Alexander’s attempt
to defeat his most powerful opponent in the cultural field in order to make way for his
recent reconstruction. Although the essay rightly identifies several weak spots in Bourdieu’s
theory of culture, I believe that this critique is itself deeply flawed and tendentiously
misinterprets its object. In comparison to Alexander’s now-developed strong program in
cultural sociology, Bourdieu’s “weak program” is actually stronger, both conceptually and
empirically. And, I suggest, there are ways to shore up the weak links in the theory to
render it even more robust.
The vicissitudes and stakes of Alexander’s cultural sociology
The approach to culture on which Alexander founds his criticism of Bourdieu is actually a
departure from his earlier contributions to the field. Before about 1990, Alexander
dedicated himself to constructing a multidimensional theory that recognized the complex
interactions of the material and ideal determinants of social behavior. His neofunctional
project criticized Parsons’s functionalism for being one-sidedly idealistic, because it held
that social order can be achieved only through the normative control of self-interested,
materialistic behavior (Alexander 1987, pp 30–31). Although he gave the early Structure of
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Social Action credit for constructing an analytic model that synthesized the cultural and
material elements of society, Alexander argued that Parsons increasingly strayed from this
multidimensional framework to one dominated by culture, in the form of institutionalized
values. Alexander wrote in 1990 that his neofunctionalism “explicitly attacked the idealist
tendencies in Parsons’ approach to action and argued that this reduction was responsible for
many defects in Parsons’ work, such as its tendency to see change in teleological terms and
its relative slighting of economic rewards and political coercion” (Alexander and Colomy
1990, p 46). Alexander’s neofunctionalism was an attempt to construct a multidimensional
theory that saw culture as analytically autonomous from material factors, with its own
internal forms and forces, but empirically intertwined and affected by them.
Using this formulation of culture, Alexander surveyed the field of cultural sociology in a
1990 volume edited with Steven Seidman. In the introductory essay (Alexander 1990), he
again criticized approaches that gave an overwhelming, one-sided influence to culture,
labeling them “culturalism.” Alexander placed in this category Dilthey’s hermeneutics, as
well as the semiotics and structuralism of Saussure, Barthes, and Lèvi-Strauss, accusing all
of reducing social behavior to cultural structures and refusing to grant analytic autonomy to
material or economically motivated behavior. He levied the opposite charge of “social
reductionism” against Gramsci’s cultural Marxism, but found more balanced the work of E.
P. Thompson and Paul Willis, both of whom see class as inseparable from the cultural
discourses that give meaning to economic behavior. Alexander also praised for its balanced
approach poststructuralism, a school in which he included both Michel Foucault and
Bourdieu. Combining Marxism and structuralism but avoiding the reductionisms of both,
the poststructuralists reveal, he argued, the intertwining of social and cultural systems
without reducing one to the other. Bourdieu’s work was also praised here for revealing that
class position is constituted by cultural codes of perception that are transmitted through
family and school and then used as the basis for social selection.
With the publication of The Meanings of Social Life in 2003, however, Alexander’s
model of the relation of culture to society has changed, as has his assessment of particular
traditions within cultural sociology. Although the defining criterion of his strong program in
cultural sociology is nominally the same – the “relative autonomy” of the symbolic realm to
affect behavior – in effect it has changed. Now the required autonomy of culture seems
more absolute than relative. In Alexander’s strong program of “cultural sociology,” culture
must be considered as an independent variable that underlies all behavior and institutions.
Any attempt to investigate culture as a dependent variable, affected by something outside of
it, is labeled “weak,” a mere “sociology of culture.” Alexander demands “a sharp analytical
uncoupling of culture from social structure,” and “the bracketing-out of wider, nonsymbolic
social relations” so that cultural forms can be investigated for their internal meanings and
codes (Alexander 2003, pp 12–13). Only after the cultural object has been created by such
formal analysis can it be examined for its intersections with social forces in the concrete,
empirical world. Any approach that intends to show the effects of the material world on the
constitution of culture is labeled reductionist.
The problem with Alexander’s demand for “analytical autonomy” is that it assumes what
it hopes to demonstrate. By initially bracketing out the influence of economic and utilitarian
relations in its formal analysis of culture, it assumes that cultural forms are not themselves
affected by these constitutionally, from the inside. The only relation between culture and
economy that this method allows is an external, fortuitous intersection of preformed forces.
But the best materialist analysts of culture, including Bourdieu but also Lukács (1962,
1973), Jameson (1971, 1981) and Adorno (1984, 1994), argue that the very forms of
culture, not merely its contents, are inextricably and internally constituted by the economic
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organization of society. Alexander’s demand for analytical autonomy arbitrarily and
capriciously precludes this competing position without attempting to disprove it.
Alexander’s criterion of the radical autonomy of culture sharply reverses his previous
assessments of other approaches to culture. The structuralism of Saussure and Lèvi-Strauss
and the hermeneutics of Dilthey, all previously castigated for a one-sided culturalism, are
now seen as “fine bedfellows” for Alexander’s strong program (Alexander 2003, p 26).
Almost all other schools are denounced as “weak.” Even Parsons, previously criticized by
Alexander for being too idealist, is now declared “insufficiently cultural” for explaining
values by functional necessities (p 16). The assessment of Foucault’s poststructuralist
attempt to show the relation of discursive structure to social power is also reversed, now
being declared weak for contaminating the pure autonomy of culture with the crass
heteronomy of power. And now Bourdieu’s work is also characterized as weak. Although
Alexander concedes that Bourdieu’s middle-range empirical work “has real merits” (p 18),
especially its ability to reveal the deep codes in cultural works, it is judged weak for its
attempt to connect these codes to the reproduction of class inequality. So Bourdieu is said to
reduce culture to a dependent variable, something influenced from the outside, “rather than
a Text that shapes the world in an immanent fashion”(p 19).
There is more at stake in Alexander’s strong program of cultural sociology, however,
than the scientific determination of the causal relation between culture and society, as he
well realizes. The political assessment and fate of all Western liberal democracies also
hangs in the balance. If human behavior is determined at least partially by the economic
laws of the capitalist market, which are objective and beyond the control of individuals,
then subjects do not freely choose their own behavior. The consent of the governed or will
of the people is just a sham, a cover for materially motivated actions. And so is the natural
equality of individuals on which democracy rests. If action is affected by material selfinterest,
then capitalist democracies with market-determined inequalities divide and stratify
people, undermining not only equality but also the cooperation necessary for society to
function. Immanuel Kant recognized this contradiction in rationalism long ago. So he
insisted that reason and the free action it ensures be severed from the external world of the
noumena, which is beyond human control and unknowable. He confined freedom to the
internal, phenomenal world of ideas and beliefs, and defined it as the ability of the subject
to impose its values on or judge the external world (Marcuse 1968, pp 134–141; Lukács
1971, pp 110–131).
Talcott Parsons rediscovered this contradiction between self-interested economic
behavior and freedom during the depths of the Great Depression. The tumultuous struggles
of this period disproved the utilitarian argument that free, materialistic behavior leads to
social order. Eschewing the collectivist attempts of the period to restore order by restricting
individual freedom, Parsons argued that society could have both freedom and order because
behavior is determined not by material self-interest but by a shared system of cultural
values. Individuals are free to choose their own behavior, but they do so within the confines
of a value system that they internalize through socialization. Freedom is thus again confined
to the realm of culture, which is autonomous from and regulates the economic world of
material interest (Alexander 1987, pp 22–35). To his credit, however, Parsons also
recognized that culture could never be completely autonomous from the utilitarian demands
of the economy. Society must motivate the utilitarian behavior that creates the material
resources (or “conditions”) on which it rests. This requires allocating material resources
differentially on the basis of efficiency, thus creating tension between the commonality of
values necessary for social integration and the inequality of allocation necessary for
material adaptation (Alexander 1987, pp 57–72).
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Alexander’s new approach to cultural sociology seems intent on eliminating this tension
between the inequality of market rewards and the commonality of cultural values in order to
unequivocally praise liberal democracies. He unilaterally celebrates the triumph of Western
democratic capitalism over socialist societies. Yet one senses beneath the surface of his
work an uneasiness with the winners of the Cold War. Alexander is, of course, aware of the
work of his former teacher Robert Bellah and his collaborators, whose Habits of the Heart
openly criticizes the dilution of America’s communal values by the ruthless utilitarianism of
“neocapitalism” (Bellah et al. 1996, vii–xxxix). How then can one defend the growing
inequalities and selfishness of the increasingly deregulated economy? By declaring that
these materials facts are irrelevant to the real foundation of human behavior. If human
freedom and social order are secured solely by a cultural tradition whose autonomous forms
are immune to the influence of economics, then there is nothing to worry about. These are
the real stakes of Alexander’s reformulation of cultural sociology. If he can refute the
sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, which subtly reveals the intricate imbrications of material and
cultural determinants of behavior, then there will be no grounds left for challenging the
freedom and rationality of modern capitalist societies.
Alexander’s criticism of Bourdieu’s cultural theory
Jeffrey Alexander mounts his most comprehensive assault on Bourdieu’s theory of culture
in the longest essay of his 1995 collection, Fin de Siècle Social Theory. The main thrust of
the essay is to show that Bourdieu violates the “standard of the relative autonomy of
culture” by holding that values are influenced by something outside of them, namely, “the
hierarchical structures of material life” (Alexander 1995, p 137). For Alexander, culture is
not an empirical fact determined by social structures but a discourse, a symbolic code
rooted in traditions. Consequently, cultural values transcend particular social structures, and
can thus constrain action and provide a basis for the autonomy of individuals (pp 4–5).
Bourdieu, however, is said to reduce culture to an immediate reflection of particular social
structures, thus producing a deterministic theory that eliminates all grounds for autonomy.
He gives full play to “the materialism and corrosive cynicism of our time” by arguing that
all action is strategic, motivated not by universal cultural codes but by particularistic
interests and a will to power that underlie every dimension of social life (p 129).
Alexander realizes, of course, that Bourdieu claims that his theory originated in a revolt
against determinism, especially that of Lèvi-Strauss’s structuralism. As Bourdieu tells the
story, he discovered in the process of researching marriage among Kabylian tribes in
Algeria that their matrimonial choices did not follow the sort of formal, structural rules
postulated by Lèvi-Strauss. Rather, marriages followed a practical but unconscious logic of
strategic interest designed to maximize a member’s status or cultural capital in the tribe
(Bourdieu 1990a, pp 59–75). Alexander argues, however, that Bourdieu’s move beyond
structuralism was intended to defeat not determinism but idealism, that is, Lévi-Strauss’s
notion that inherent cultural rules govern action. For the latter’s cultural determinism,
Bourdieu merely substitutes a deterministic instrumental theory that undermines the
autonomy of culture altogether. Although Bourdieu claims that behavior is influenced by
internalized symbolic codes, Alexander insists that he reduces these codes to “immediate
reflections of the hierarchical structures of material life,” that is, class structure (p 137). He
ends up with a version of deterministic Marxism that subjugates all culture and action to an
underlying material base. Thus, Bourdieu’s battle against cultural determinism is really just
a Trojan horse though which to insert the troops of Marxist economism.
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At this point in Alexander’s argument, a crucial question comes to the fore: why is the
influence of action by internalized cultural codes any less “deterministic” than its influence
by material interests in an external social structure? Do not both restrict the autonomy of
action? No, Alexander answers, on two grounds. First, he argues on a conceptual basis that
material interests directly determine action, while internalized cultural values create a space
of indeterminacy between institutional expectations and particular acts. The latter is true
“because ideals are immanently universalistic...they have an inherent tendency to become
matters of principle that demand to be generalized in ‘unpractical’ ways” (p 137). In other
words, values are general imperatives that must be specified for each particular situation,
leaving actors autonomy of interpretation or specification. Practical interests, on the other
hand, dictate particular actions. Second, Alexander argues on a historical basis that the
social differentiation that comes with modernization creates an organizational independence
of the carriers of culture, such as religious leaders and intellectuals, from the centers of
material interests, such as the economy and polity. Because cultural values are universal and
increasingly free from ties to material structures, they are more likely to be consensual than
interests, which are by definition particular and thus disparate. For example, Alexander
goes to great lengths in The Meanings of Social Life to reveal “the remarkable durability
and continuity of a single culture structure” in American society, a consensual discourse of
civil society that exerts a constraining influence on the expression of all particular interests
(Alexander 2003, p 154).
Being thoroughly familiar with the criticisms of functionalism’s postulate of consensus,
however, Alexander is careful to deny that such a cultural consensus restricts the freedom
of individuals, arguing instead that it actually provides the grounds for critical distance from
social structure. The internalization of cultural values gives the self access to universal
collective representations – e.g., equality, rationality, freedom – that may serve as resources
to criticize and gain independence from particular social structures (Alexander 1995,
pp 144–146). By contrast, Bourdieu’s attempt to reduce culture to particular material
interests destroys this critical distance, thus binding the self tightly to existing social
structures and ensuring their unproblematic reproduction. Alexander develops this
argument by criticizing Bourdieu’s key concept of habitus, which is crucial for
understanding his conception of culture. Bourdieu uses this term to refer to an internalized
cognitive structure, an acquired set of durable dispositions that structure the actor’s
practices or actions. It is his way of acknowledging the importance of subjective or cultural
determinants of social action. Alexander argues, though, that the dispositions of Bourdieu’s
habitus do not have enough independent causal force to create autonomy for the self, for
they are determined directly by the conditions of material existence which the individual
experiences early in life, that is, by her position in the class structure. Thus, habitus is
merely a subjective reflection of the objective distribution of material resources, and does
not leave the critical space between social structures and mental structures necessary for
autonomy. It is not a set of general rules that guide action, but a particular strategy for
obtaining objective resources that determines action. The concept’s utter lack of subjective
distance from objective conditions is revealed, Alexander argues, by Bourdieu’s insistence
that the habitus is less a state of mind than a state of the body. The dispositions of the
habitus are instilled in the corporeal existence of the individual in such a way that renders
them inaccessible to the conscious mind (Alexander 1995, pp 136–149).
Alexander acknowledges Bourdieu’s insistence that a habitus becomes an active
influence on action only within a specific field, a term he uses to refer to a particular
realm of contest with its own peculiar resources and rules. For Bourdieu the structure of
particular fields thus refracts the habitus, producing different strategies and actions from the
386 Theor Soc (2007) 36:381–413
same dispositions. By introducing this concept he seems to acknowledge the social
differentiation of modern societies, that is, the relative autonomy of particular institutional
realms, especially cultural institutions. But Alexander argues that the indeterminacy
between habitus and action within the field is insufficient to sustain individual autonomy.
Ultimately, he insists, Bourdieu reduces the structure of all fields to reflections of the
structure of the capitalist economy, insisting each is merely another arena for profit-making
and calculation.
Bourdieu introduces the concepts of habitus and field, Alexander argues, mainly to
explain the reproduction of this capitalist class structure. The social field – Bourdieu’s name
for the class structure of a society – inculcates individuals from different class positions
with different habitus. These habitus then generate class-specific practices for the
appropriation of scarce resources in all the fields in which they are deployed, especially
the cultural fields such as art, music, food, literature, and sport. Members of the dominant
class, however, have the power to define their cultural practices as superior, making
themselves seem superior as individuals and thus legitimating their unequal share of social
resources. Instead of giving individuals universal cultural codes and values that allow them
to criticize particular structures of material resources, then, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus
determines class-differentiating practices that mark out and ultimately legitimate existing
material inequalities. Alexander claims that the actual content of Bourdieu’s class cultures is
arbitrary, without importance. All that matters is that the culture of the dominant is seen as
different from and superior to that of the dominated. Culture thus has no autonomy to shape
the world immanently, from within; it is merely an external instrument for the reproduction
of material inequalities (Alexander 1995, pp 158–164; 2003, pp 18–19).
Alexander’s criticism of Bourdieu’s cultural sociology is driven not merely by theoretical
concerns in sociology but also by a political interest—namely, the defense of the “liberal
democratic project.” The concept of democracy, he argues, necessarily rests on the
conception of a public realm or civil society, an arena of discourse based on common
values independent from the demands of state and economy, both of which are interestdriven,
instrumental spheres. Without such an independent, shared culture that controls
power and money, no conception of democracy is possible. Because Bourdieu denies
independence to the cultural sphere by seeing it as influenced by the economy, he does not
recognize the uniqueness of liberal capitalist societies. Alexander seems especially exercised
over the fact that Bourdieu refuses to dutifully choose sides in the Cold War and put his
sociology at the service of Western capitalist democracies. He conceptualizes state
communism as merely a variation on the structures of domination of the West, a form in
which political capital predominates over economic capital. Such an attempt to “negate
bourgeois society in its democratic form” by lumping it together with state communism is,
Alexander proclaims, outmoded due to the triumph of the former. Bourdieu’s theory persists
only due to the ignorance of him and his followers, who do not “seem to understand what a
multidimensional social theory actually requires” (Alexander 1995, p 193).
Finally, Alexander charges that Bourdieu cannot reflexively account for his own critical
sociology within his reductionist theory of culture. If all knowledge is merely a reflection of
class-conditioned habitus that in the long run reproduce the class structure, how does his
sociological knowledge avoid this determination in order to grasp and expose it? How does
Bourdieu’s theory transcend the class interests that it postulates? Alexander holds that the
only plausible explanation Bourdieu gives for the validity of his insights is “the thoroughly
conventional claim...[of] scientific objectivity rooted in disciplinary autonomy” (Alexander
1995, p 182). More specifically, Bourdieu claims that because the scientific field has been
differentiated from the economy and possesses its own independent resources and rules, it
Theor Soc (2007) 36:381–413 387
is unaffected by class interests. But he applies this disciplinary objectivity selectively,
claiming it for himself but denying it to other academics and sociologists, whom he accuses
of allowing their class-conditioned habitus to influence their knowledge and determine selfinterested
strategies for scholastic distinction. Alexander argues that a critical distance from
existing social structures cannot be found within those structures themselves, of which
scientific disciplines are parts, but outside of them, in a socially produced self that “is
informed by a cultural tradition that has made distanciation, dissatisfaction, and the search
for justice some of its central themes” (Alexander 1995, p 186). In other words, criticism
must be grounded in a cultural tradition independent of the economy, with values similar to
those of liberal Western societies.
The strengths of Bourdieu’s weak program: A defense against Alexander
Jeffrey Alexander mounts a formidable attack on the cultural theory of one of the most
renown sociologists of the second half of the twentieth century. Some of his blows are fair
and on-target, landing on widely recognized vulnerabilities in Bourdieu’s theoretical
corpus. In the next section I acknowledge these weak spots and offer modifications that I
believe address these legitimate criticisms. But some of Alexander’s punches are clearly
low blows, unfair criticisms that derive their force from distortions and deletions of
Bourdieu’s vast body of published work. I turn to these illegitimate strikes first, in an
attempt to show that Bourdieu’s weak program is actually much stronger than it is portrayed
by Alexander, whose own strong program pales in comparison.
Perhaps the biggest distortion is Alexander’s contention that Bourdieu conceives the
cultural realm as an immediate reflection of economic determinants, without the least bit of
autonomy. In reality, Bourdieu emphasizes time and time again that the influence of class
position on cultural practices is not direct but mediated by not one but two crucial variables,
habitus and field. Alexander can continue to insist on Bourdieu’s unmediated determination
of culture by class interests only by dismissing the independent effect of these variables,
arguing that they merely transmit the determining power of class interests into the cultural
realm and have no ability to modify or control them (Alexander 2003, p 18). Below I
examine the concepts of habitus and field to reveal that Bourdieu uses them specifically to
introduce contingency into action. But first I want to point out, on a more fundamental and
functional level, that Bourdieu’s mechanism of class reproduction absolutely requires for its
successful operation the relative autonomy of culture that Alexander denies it possesses.
Bourdieu’s basic argument is that culture legitimates class by presenting a misrecognition
of its privileges. The greater resources – or capital, in Bourdieu’s words – possessed by
the dominant class are translated through habitus into individual cultural practices that are
defined as superior. Thus, the appearance is created that members of this class have what
they have (capital) because of who they are (culturally superior individuals), when in fact
they are who they are because of what they have (Bourdieu 1990b, pp 139–141). This
misrecognition or illusion would not be possible if, as Alexander contends, culture were an
immediate reflection of class position, that is, a direct consequence, here and now, without
intervening space or substance. Indeed, the word “reflection” itself denotes an image, the
visibility of something on or in something else. If cultural practices were direct reflections
of class position, the latter would be obvious and visible in the former, causing its recognition,
not misrecognition. Such a recognition would directly confront its beholders with
the reality of class privilege and hence, in Bourdieu’s theory at least, prevent its legitimation
and reproduction. A direct, unmediated relation between class and culture would mean that
388 Theor Soc (2007) 36:381–413
a class’s economic capital, or income, determines its consumption habits—for example, a
bourgeois drives a Mercedes simply because he can afford its higher price, and a worker
drives a Ford simply because she cannot. But Bourdieu specifically denies such a
determination of taste by income, writing that “income tends to be credited with a causal
efficacy which it in fact only exerts in association with the habitus it has produced. The
specific efficacy of the habitus is clearly seen when the same income is associated with
very different patterns of consumption, which can only be understood by assuming that
other selection principles have intervened” (Bourdieu 1984, pp 375–376). The variable
tastes determined by habitus provide the obscuring screen behind which the reality of class
privilege reproduces itself.
The contention that Bourdieu postulates an unmediated determination of culture by
material resources also betrays a misunderstanding of how he defines class. Alexander
speaks as if the class structure of a society is always and necessarily a structure of objective,
material resources, which in Bourdieu determines the subjectivity of culture from the
outside. Bourdieu does conceive the social field of classes as the realm of instrumentalities,
in which people struggle practically to accumulate and reproduce resources. But these
resources are not merely material but cultural as well. In Distinction (Bourdieu 1984,
pp 114–132) and other works (Bourdieu 1998b, pp 1–14), Bourdieu clearly defines classes
as constituted by the intersection of two different resource distributions—one of economic
capital, and the other of cultural capital. He argues that the primary differences between
classes derive from the overall volume of both capitals combined, while the secondary
differences that define class fractions are determined by the relative proportions of the
different kinds of capital. Cultural assets, defined largely as the honorability of one’s
symbolic tastes and practices, are an integral constituent of class position, thus
contradicting Alexander’s contention that in Bourdieu’s theory culture is determined by a
class structure outside and apart from it. Since class is itself constituted by culture, its
influence on cultural practices must be at least partially internal—that is, culture
determining culture. Although this deflects Alexander’s criticism of economic determinism,
it creates another problem for Bourdieu’s theory. If class is partially defined by cultural
assets, then the determination of culture by class is tautological. The explanation
degenerates into the simple idea of the transmission of culture from one generation to the
next in the home and school, and thus bypasses what are supposed to be the intervening
variables of habitus and field. This is an important issue, but because it is not central to the
problems addressed here, I will leave it aside.
It is one thing to say that Bourdieu needs variables that intervene between class and
culture to make his theory of class reproduction function properly. It is something
altogether different to say that he adequately provides for this need. Alexander holds
forcefully that he does not, arguing that the concepts of habitus and field are not
autonomous but merely mechanical reflections of the class structure of a society. I contend,
however, that he is wrong. The way Bourdieu employs these concepts both conceptually
and empirically clearly reveals that they are relatively autonomous from class structure and
create the necessary contingency and indeterminacy of individual action. I examine habitus
first, the concept proximate to class in Bourdieu’s causal scheme.
Alexander argues that habitus “are immediate reflections of the hierarchical structures of
material life,” which consequently leads Bourdieu to “focus on real political–economic
causes rather than on their ‘ephemeral,’ merely ‘subjective’ representations” (Alexander
1995, p 138). Anyone who has read Bourdieu, however, knows that this is simply not true.
In major works such as Distinction he spends very little time or effort analyzing economic
structures. The empirical data presented is dedicated to detailing “ephemeral” cultural
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practices – food, literature, art, museum-going – and revealing their relation to the
generative principles of the different class habitus. Alexander argues, though, that these
cultural practices cannot be autonomous because they are not subjective, rule-determined
behaviors but objective, interest-determined behaviors—that is, strategic actions rationally
calculated to maximize important resources (Alexander 1995, pp 149–152). For example,
he argues that Bourdieu’s art consumers are motivated by the search not for beauty but for
distinction or status advantage over others (p 174). But again, this is a distortion of his
theory of consumption. Bourdieu has stated time and time again that his actors do not
consciously seek distinction in their consumption, which distinguishes his theory from
Veblen’s concept of conspicuous consumption. As he states (Bourdieu 1988–1989, p 783):
“The sort of conscious search for distinction described by Thorstein Veblen and postulated
by the philosophy of action or rational choice theory is in fact the very negation of
distinguished conduct as I have analyzed it.” Because the habitus is a form of knowledge
that does not require consciousness, it “produces strategies which are objectively adjusted
to the objective situation even though these strategies are neither the outcome of the explicit
aiming at consciously pursued goals, nor the result of some mechanical determination by
external causes. Social action is guided by a practical sense, what we may call a ‘feel for
the game’” (p 782). Consequently, Bourdieu states that art consumers – at least those in the
dominant class – do indeed seek beauty. Their abundant capital insulates them from the
necessities of life and instills in them a habitus characterized by the “aesthetic disposition,”
a propensity to privilege the form of things over their function. Their consumption thus
distinguishes them, without any intention, from the working class, whose sparse capital
instills a taste for necessity, a propensity to focus on the bare-bones functionality of goods
(Bourdieu 1984, pp 29–41). Members of the dominant class thus need only follow their
inner, subjective disposition for beauty to mark out their differences from workers and
attain an aura of superiority that legitimates their capital.
In defense of Alexander, one might object that regardless of whether the behavior
motivated by habitus is conscious or unconscious, it is still a reflection of the immediate
distribution of class resources and thus has no autonomy to contradict or criticize this
structure. Yet habitus does have one attribute that makes it sufficiently autonomous from
class structure to contradict it—durability. Bourdieu defines habitus as systems of durable,
transposable dispositions that are the products of particular class conditions of existence,
that is, material conditions associated with particular class positions and their resources
(Bourdieu 1990b, p 53). Like psychoanalysis, he assigns particular weight in the acquisition
of habitus to early childhood experiences, which condition a preconscious, corporeal sense
that “tends to ensure its own constancy and its defense against change through the selection
it makes within new information by rejecting information capable of calling into question
its accumulated information” (pp 60–61). Thus, this durable, largely unchangeable habitus
that the individual carries within her for life is the present product of the social structures of
the past; it is embodied history, “the active presence of the whole past of which it is the
product. As such, it is what gives practices their relative autonomy with respect to external
determinations of the immediate present. This autonomy is that of the past, enacted and
acting, which, functioning as accumulated capital, produces history on the basis of history
and so ensures the permanence in change that makes the individual agent a world within the
world” (p 56).
This durability of the habitus contradicts Alexander’s contention that it is an
“immediate” reflection of social structures. The word “immediate” carries the temporal
denotation of right now, with no lapses of time. The possibility of time lapses and lags that
is built into the concept creates the possibility – indeed, the likelihood – that the durable
390 Theor Soc (2007) 36:381–413
habitus will clash with changed social structures. Bourdieu calls such temporal lags
“hysteresis”, and argues that dispositions out of phase with present structures because they
are the product of past structures “can be the source of misadaptation as well as adaptation,
revolt as well as resignation” (p 62). This concept of hysteresis is employed in Homo
Academicus, Bourdieu’s book on the French academic field, to explain the student revolt of
1968. Here he argues that the overproduction of students and teachers in French universities
in the 1960s caused a devaluation of their credentials on the job market. The declining
objective opportunities afforded by educational credentials clashed with the high subjective
expectations of career success internalized by young students and teachers during their
childhoods in the 1940s and 1950s to create their sense of being deprived of what was
rightfully theirs (Bourdieu 1988, pp 152–193). Alexander is familiar with this example of
habitus contributing to revolt against structures, but he dismisses it as completely devoid of
any subjective causes. He argues that “the subjective element [in this analysis] falls away”
because “Bourdieu can insist, nonetheless, that the source of such tension can be nothing
other than the objective economic situation” (Alexander 1995, pp 148, 149). But this is a
serious and reductionist misunderstanding of his theory. This crisis cannot be understood by
focusing single-mindedly on either the subjective habitus or the objective structures, but
only by the combination and confrontation between the two, by the “ongoing dialectic”
between the subjective hopes of the habitus and the objective chances of the social structure
or field (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p 130). I now turn to the latter concept to argue
further for the relative autonomy of culture in Bourdieu’s theory.
For Bourdieu, indeterminacy or autonomy is guaranteed not only by the mediation of the
durable habitus between the objective structures and individual action but also by the
mediation of the field between habitus and action, thus creating a double mediation. How
an individual with a habitus conditioned by a particular class position acts depends upon the
structure of the particular field of contest in which she is acting. Bourdieu conceives of
society not as one big unified struggle for a few common resources, but as a
conglomeration of relatively independent struggles for a variety of resources. He calls
these relatively independent contests “fields,” and postulates that each has its own set of
rules. Modern societies possess, among others, fields of economics, religion, science,
academics, power, bureaucracy, and art. And many of these fields are composed of distinct
subfields. Individuals’ class-conditioned habitus determine to a large extent where they will
be positioned upon entering the field, for these durable predispositions condition how actors
perceive the field’s opportunities. But once in the game, the established structure shapes the
actions of all within it, regardless of their background. Thus, Bourdieu writes that “it is only
in relation to certain structures that habitus produces given discourses or practices...We
must think of it [habitus] as a sort of spring that needs a trigger and, depending upon the
stimuli and structure of the field, the very same habitus will generate different, even
opposite, outcomes” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p 135).
Bourdieu argues that the actions flowing from habitus are shaped not merely by the
field’s general structure but also by the specific strategies that actors pursue at a given time.
As in a game of chess, an actor selects from among all possible actions those specific
actions that further her interests, and her opponents must constantly adjust their actions to
these actions, and vice versa, introducing even more indeterminacy. Thus, for example, in
the field of cultural consumption members of the dominant class have a habitus that inclines
them to consume products that are formalized and aestheticized, unconsciously revealing
the distance from necessity afforded by their superior economic capital. But which
formalized products they choose depends upon the consumption of the petty bourgeoisie,
which seeks to gain distinction in the consumption game by imitating the products
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consumed by the dominant class. This imitation, however, renders these products
commonplace, thus undermining their distinction. To counter these moves and maintain
their distinction, the dominant must constantly seek out new consumer products that are
rare and unsullied by widespread circulation (Bourdieu 1984, pp 251–252; Gartman 2002).
Thus, one cannot simply predict actions from the rules and structure of the field but must
also take into account the actual moves and strategies of the competitors.
Bourdieu considers the structure of the field and its ongoing dynamics so important as
determinants of action that he argues that these may actually change the habitus of an actor.
“The specific logic of a field is established in the incorporated state in the form of a specific
habitus, or, more precisely, a sense of the game,” which is a modification of the original
habitus acquired in childhood (Bourdieu 2000, p 11; also pp 99–100). By thus postulating
the flexibility of the habitus, Bourdieu allows for the possibility of individual social
mobility (including his own), countering Alexander’s charge (Alexander 1995, pp 170–
171) of a rigid structural determination of status attainment in his theory. An actor’s
childhood habitus may be modified to adapt to the rules of specific fields. But by providing
for greater flexibility of the habitus, Bourdieu actually undermines his argument that action
can contradict structure through hysteresis. Because he now conceives habitus as
determined not merely by the past structure of socialization but also by the present
structure of the field, Bourdieu deprives the concept of its ability to determine behavior
contradictory of social structures. It adjusts, although slowly, to whatever structure is
present in a field, a conception that seems to validate Alexander’s assertion that it cannot be
the location of an autonomy of action. I address this problem with the concept of habitus
again below.
The independent influence of the field is particularly important in cultural actions, for
Bourdieu argues that in modern societies the cultural field achieves substantial but not
absolute autonomy from the economic field. In fact, in the high-art or restricted subfield of
cultural production, the rules are the inversion of those that apply in the economy. While in
the latter the objective is to maximize economic profits, in the high arts making money is
absolutely proscribed, and the artist who gets rich is denigrated. In other words, in art the
winners lose. According to the rules of the cultural field, the objective of the contest is the
accumulation of symbolic profits, that is, recognition by other producers (artists, writers,
etc.). This rule shapes the behavior of all who enter the game and creates a dynamic of
innovation and consecration peculiar to the cultural field. In culture, innovation is
emphasized, the creation of something different to attract the recognition of others in the
field. Those who gain recognition from the institutions of the field (museums, galleries,
schools) become “consecrated” and rise to the top. But the symbolic profits of consecration
also bring these artists the economic profits of the marketplace, for members of the
dominant class purchase their work as testimony to their cultural capital. Because
accumulation of economic profits violates the rules of the field, the unconsecrated
(unsuccessful) artists denounce the more fortunate as “sell-outs” and pioneer new forms of
“pure art,” some of which are subsequently consecrated, starting a new round of the cycle.
Bourdieu argues that this cycle is accelerated when a mass of new entrants pours into the
field. To attain recognition and stand out in the crowded field, the new competitors cannot
merely imitate the work of the consecrated but must pioneer new aesthetic forms. The entry
of producers from a variety of social positions ensures such novelty, for their differing
habitus incline them to different forms (Bourdieu 1996, pp 121–128, 146–161, 253–256;
Gartman 2002).
Contrary to Alexander’s assertions, then, Bourdieu recognizes that the cultural field can
be and, in modern societies, generally is autonomous from the economy, but only relatively,
392 Theor Soc (2007) 36:381–413
for this autonomy still has an economic foundation. In order for individual artists and the
field in general to be free of economic determinants, both must have sufficient economic
resources to be self-supporting and hence disengaged from the larger economy. At the
individual level, this means that if artists are to be unconcerned with sales on the market,
they must have independent income to support themselves. At the collective level, this
means that if the entire field is to be insulated from the demands of the profit-making
economy, it must have a strong internal market; that is, there must be a large demand for art
works by artists, museums, critics, and other in the high-art field whose purchases are
driven by autonomous artistic standards rather than pecuniary motives. Bourdieu
empirically demonstrates the economic conditions under which a cultural field becomes
autonomous, and generally reveals the complex interactions between habitus and field, in
The Rules of Art (Bourdieu 1996), an analysis of French literature in the nineteenth century.
During the Second Empire in France (1852–1871), the changing social field of classes
shifted the economic support for literature. Rapid industrialization created a new class of
industrialists and financiers that undermined the power and wealth of the aristocracy, which
had traditionally supported the arts through a patronage system. At the same time, however,
industrialization created a new market for literature among both this bourgeoisie and the
popular classes, the latter of which benefited from increased literacy and access to
education. These changes created not only more readers but more writers as well, as the
educated of all classes who could not find employment in business or civil service crowded
into the literary field and expanded its numbers. These newcomers were differentially
positioned in the literary field according to their class habitus. Writers from bourgeois
backgrounds generally positioned themselves toward the high end of the field, producing
the type of watered-down, formal Romanticism that appealed to their class confrères, while
those from petty-bourgeois and working-class backgrounds usually selected the lower end
of the market, producing the genre of social realism that expressed the politics and
practicality of the lower classes. Although their class habitus attracted new writers to
different positions in the field, once occupied these positions themselves determined a
homologous solidarity with the classes for which they wrote, with, for example, writers
dominated in the literary field feeling sympathy with the dominated (working) class in the
social field.
During this period, though, a revolution began to disengage literature from direct
dependence upon the market formed by these outside classes. This revolution was made by
writers from a class between the bourgeois and working-class poles of the field—the class
of liberal professionals, who had relatively equal amounts of economic and cultural capital.
These sons of knowledge-based, intellectual professionals like doctors and lawyers were
inclined by their habitus toward an attitude of impartiality and precision, and were thus
alienated from both the politicizing tendencies of social realism and the facile moralizing of
bourgeois Romanticism. However, it was not merely these class dispositions but their
intersection with the dynamics of the field that produced this new position that pioneered
autonomy. In the crowded and highly competitive field, these writers, whose foremost
representative was Gustave Flaubert, had to innovate a new genre to attract attention. So,
breaking with but mediating between the established literary poles and their class markets,
they took the mundane subject matter of the working-class realists and treated it with the
high forms of the bourgeois Romantics. The result was an art-for-art’s-sake style that sought
to strip writing of all social content and be about nothing more than form itself. Initially, the
inherited wealth of these sons of professionals provided the economic support that allowed
them to pioneer a new art with no immediate market. But ultimately, the expanding ranks
of the literary field itself, especially the bohemia of underemployed artists and writers,
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provided the most important market for the new style. This intellectual reserve army,
imbued with autonomous aesthetic standards by the high-art field to which they aspired,
could appreciate and support an art of pure form that did not cater to the immediate tastes
and interests of classes in the economic field (Bourdieu 1996, pp 47–112).
In explaining the emergence of autonomy in literature by the habitus of producers and
the dynamics of the field, Bourdieu denies that he annihilates the creativity of individual
writers like Flaubert. “Such [sociological] analysis seems to abolish the singularity of the
‘creator’ in favor of the relations which made the work intelligible, only better to rediscover
it at the end of the task of reconstructing the space in which the author finds himself
encompassed and included as a point. To recognize this point...is to be in a position to
understand and to feel, by mental identification with a constructed position, the singularity
of that position and of the person who occupies it, and the extraordinary effort which, at
least in the particular case of Flaubert, was necessary to make it exist” (Bourdieu 1996,
xix). So contrary to Alexander, who charges Bourdieu with depriving individual actors of
the formal, cultural autonomy that would allow them to be creative, this analysis shows that
cultural autonomy is not a pregiven theoretical category but a historical construction
produced by creative individual efforts, but efforts made possible by the intersection of
external economic resources and internal relations between producers (Bourdieu 1996,
pp 193–205).
Bourdieu argues, however, that this hard-won autonomy of the cultural field of high art
ultimately binds it back to the field of economic classes through a legitimation function.
Even though the newly autonomous works of art no longer immediately reflect the interests
of the economic bourgeoisie, members of this class appropriate the consecrated works of
the field because their material resources condition a habitus that privileges the form of
things over their function. But precisely because such works are concerned with
autonomous aesthetic forms and not the pecuniary gains of the economic market, they
seem “higher,” disinterested in and above the selfish materiality of everyday life.
Consequently, those who consume this autonomous “high” art seem somehow superior,
better than the masses who consume culture from producers who are obviously out to make
money. Thus, without any conscious aiming or intentionality, the very autonomy of culture
ensures that it functions to legitimate and reproduce the inequalities of economic class
(Bourdieu 1984).
Thus, contrary to Alexander’s attempt to reduce Bourdieu’s theory to a simplistic
economic determinism, it provides for several points of indeterminacy, and hence
autonomy, between class and culture. Yet, in the last analysis the two are still tied together
in complex relations of mutual influence. To deny this influence, to assert, as Alexander
does, the absolute autonomy of ideas and beliefs to determine action free of the material
concerns of everyday life is simply a fallacy, but one which Bourdieu can explain within his
theory of the relative autonomy of culture. He labels the propensity to see action as
determined by cultural constructs like norms and beliefs the “scholastic fallacy,” and
attributes this mistake to the structural position of intellectuals and scholars in society. In
modern societies, scholastics or academics is another cultural field that achieves autonomy
from the economic field. In a process similar to that undergone by the field of literature
describe above, the emergence of independent material support – in this case, mainly from
the state – detaches education and science from direct dependence on the market, and
allows its practitioners to pursue pure knowledge in a manner unconcerned with practical
application or money-making. Because of this independent economic foundation, scholars
and scientists have the leisure to be disinterested in the practicality or particularities of ideas
and become “interested” only in universals, detached, general ideas. In fact, the rules of the
394 Theor Soc (2007) 36:381–413
scholastic field imbue its participants with an “interest in disinterestedness” (Bourdieu
1998b, p 112, see also pp 87–88); they win symbolic capital (reputation) and advance in the
field only by showing in their work the requisite unconcern for practical application or
pecuniary reward.
Bourdieu argues that this privileged realm of scholastics is different from the rest of the
social world, in which the vast majority of people must be concerned with the practicalities
of material existence. In the latter world of everyday practice, people do not have the luxury
of treating cultural objects (ideas, norms, values) as ends in themselves, but must use them
as practical means to the end of making a living. Their actions are governed by a “logic,”
by regularities that make sense and can be explained. It is not a pure logic, however, but a
practical one, a pre-logical logic of practice or a sens pratique, the French title of one of
Bourdieu’s (1990b) most important books. The problem with academics, especially social
scientists, Bourdieu asserts, is that they do not recognize the peculiarity of their privilege to
treat ideas as pure forms removed from practical content, and attribute the same propensity
to the entire social world. The scholastic or theoretical fallacy is to see the entire world as a
“school,” and all the actors in it as motivated, like scholars, by an autonomous set of
universal principles that are free of practical context and content. In The Logic of Practice
(Bourdieu 1990b) Bourdieu uses Lèvi-Strauss’s structuralism as an example of the
scholastic fallacy, for it sees all human action as determined by a set of abstract,
autonomous rules governed by their own internal relations, as opposed to influenced from
without by the practical circumstances of their use. Lèvi-Strauss’s account of kinship, for
example, reduces marriage choice to a system of logical rules that really explain nothing,
for they ignore the specific contexts that members confront when faced with the practical
task of making a “good marriage.” The scholar substitutes her own relation to the object
under investigation, a relation of removed contemplation and understanding, for the actor’s
own relation of contingent accomplishment of practical necessities. Not only is this a
distortion of reality; it is also a motivated distortion that hides the economic foundation
of scholarly life—the privileged access to independent resources that allows disinterested
contemplation to begin with (Bourdieu 1990b, pp 30–41; 1998b, pp 127–140; 2000,
pp 1–48).
Alexander’s “strong” program in cultural sociology epitomizes the scholastic fallacy. His
insistence on the absolute autonomy of cultural factors in determining behavior reflects the
“intellectualocentrism” of the academic world insulated from the practicalities of the
everyday world of practice. Especially from Alexander’s position in the scholastic field – a
privileged position in a privileged world – it is all too easy to forget the class resources that
allow removal from the world of material practicalities. From this Olympian height, the
material ground of not only the intellectual world but the rest of the world as well fades in
the distance, and it seems as if everyone possesses the intellectual’s freedom to be
concerned only with the discourse of ideas and beliefs, removed from the contaminating
economism of which only the vulgar, Marxist and otherwise, speak. Ignoring the material
world also facilitates the forgetting of the material inequalities of “liberal capitalism” and
makes its defense more palatable. If all society is like a school, then “action” is nothing
more than an equal and open discourse on ideas and beliefs, like a graduate seminar in
which everyone gets his say and forgets about those whose say is silenced by their lack of
the price of tuition and the habitus imbued by the ability to pay it. Even sociologists like
Jürgen Habermas (1970), who theorizes the primacy of communicative action in society,
realizes that in modern industrial societies the inequalities of instrumental action
(economics and politics) distort communication and undermine its natural equality and
universality. Not so Alexander, who seems to believe that any recognition of the effect of
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class inequality on civic discourse threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the entire
project of Western civilization.
This motivated and determined ignorance of any material determinants outside of culture
actually leaves Alexander’s “strong program” in cultural sociology quite weak in its
explanations of empirical events. While he accuses Bourdieu’s empirical studies of being
“highly simplistic but highly contrived” (Alexander 1995, p 164), in actuality it is his own
attempts to apply his theory that smack of simplistic reductionism. Take, for example, his
analysis in “The Discourse of American Civil Society,” which appears in The Meanings of
Social Life (Alexander 2003, pp 121–154). Here Alexander and his co-author, Philip Smith,
argue in line with the general theory that in democracies like the United States, there is an
independent, legally regulated civil society that is distinct from the state and economy and
exercises a controlling influence over these institutions. This civil society is defined by a
unique set of consensual cultural codes that, like Lèvi Strauss’s logical structures, take the
form of binary oppositions, such as law versus power, equality versus hierarchy, and
inclusive versus exclusive. To demonstrate empirically the existence and causal efficacy of
these codes, Alexander and Smith range randomly over 150 years of American political
history, picking out debates and scandals and examining the structure of their argumentation.
All this is accomplished without the least hint of the underlying instrumental
interests at stake in the discourse of, for example, the Bank War of the 1830s, the Teapot
Dome scandal, or the Iran-Contra affair. The authors give us political history in which the
structure of the language used to carry out conflicts is the main determinate of political
behavior, which is tantamount to arguing that the main cause of wars is the weapons used to
fight them. Also ignored as irrelevant are the historical contexts of these clashes, which
give the forms of political discourse concrete meanings and constrain their use. So, for
example, it is not really very cogent or robust to explain political behavior by the rhetorical
appeal to “equality” against “hierarchy,” since these words have been defined so variously
by different interests in different periods of American history. It is difficult to see how a
discursive structure so amorphous and vague as to allow the expression of almost any
political interests in any historical context can constrain behavior in the way that Alexander
demands.
Just how much Alexander’s “strong program” of cultural sociology weakens his ability
to cogently explain empirical events is revealed by the chapter entitled “Watergate as
Democratic Ritual” in The Meanings of Social Life. Although he does not mention the fact,
this chapter is actually a radically modified version of an article he published in
Sociological Theory as “Three Models of Culture and Society Relations: Toward an
Analysis of Watergate” (Alexander 1984, pp 290–314). Alexander published this version
during the period in which he was dedicated to developing a multidimensional theory of
society that revealed the complex interactions of cultural and material factors. Thus, he
shows here how the material interests of conflicting groups are channeled or “refracted”
through a consensual system of values. The common values of refraction in the Watergate
crisis were equality and liberty, and the groups that struggled over their meaning were
modernizing liberals and traditional conservatives. The former group was composed of
middle-class intellectuals, planners, and professionals, whose commitment to modernization
and rationalization led them to emphasize universalistic values like equality, inclusion, and
secularization. Reacting to this program, conservatives, whom Alexander does not locate
socioeconomically, defended traditional notions of individual liberty and the particularisms
of family and nation. Alexander argues that Nixon was elected as the leader of a
conservative backlash against modernizing liberals, and that the Watergate break-in was
initially viewed through the clashing cultural meanings of these conflicting interest groups.
396 Theor Soc (2007) 36:381–413
However, after Nixon’s reelection, a broad center of opinion emerged to interpret this clash
of interest groups as threatening to the foundation of American society. This “center”
appealed to a general interpretation of American values, not these groups’ particular
refractions, to form a consensus on the Watergate events that united the nation. Furthering
the growth of this centrist public was the emergence of a more centrist elite among
professionals, still dedicated to universalism but shorn of the more extreme elements of the
left, which were declining. Finally, this centrist consensus was solidified by the Watergate
hearings, a symbolic ritual publically embodying the generalization of values. In these
hearings the events were recast as a mythic morality play of good versus evil, based on the
general values all Americans shared: the impersonal versus the personal, law versus power,
universalism versus particularism.
Of course, one could challenge this reconstruction and interpretation of Watergate
events, but the important point is that in this earlier version Alexander attempts to integrate
the analysis of cultural values with an account of the interests behind those values and their
specific interpretations. In the later version of the Watergate paper published in Meanings,
however, his “strong program” has censored any such integration. The first 13 pages of the
original article, containing the discussion of refraction of conflicting interests through
culture, has been eliminated. Now Alexander speaks of Watergate in exclusively cultural
terms, with no mention of liberals versus conservatives or modernizers against
antimodernization forces. Consequently, the series of steps delivering the nation from
crisis to normalcy is now severely truncated, with Alexander focusing almost exclusively
on the structure of discourse in the Watergate hearings. The exclusively cultural focus even
changes the chronology of this ritual renewal. In the earlier version he concludes that
cultural consensus did not emerge until after Nixon’s 1972 reelection, while here Alexander
claims that 4 months before the election a “significant symbolic structuring had
occurred”—not a value generalization but a “symbolic generalization.” In other words,
even though different groups were still fighting over the particular meanings of values, they
were fighting with the same cultural codes, like good and evil, pure and impure. This
symbolic consensus, Alexander argues, “laid the basis for everything that followed even
while it did not produce consensus at more social levels” (Alexander 2003, p 158). Here is
the epitome of his reductionism. Now, instead of explaining events by social factors like
interest groups, institutions, even values, Alexander believes it sufficient to remain at the
deepest cognitive level, the a priori structures of discourse and symbolism itself, which lay
the basis for everything else. Thus, while Bourdieu reveals all cognitive structures to be
grounded in social positions and the unconscious interests attached to them, Alexander
reduces all social determinants to cognitive structures, showing social conflicts to be
ultimately determined by the symbolic structures of their discourses.
A weakness in Alexander’s empirical applications even more serious than this
ahistoricism and reductionism is the assumption that American political discourse is based
on a shared set of codes and symbolic structures, employed equally by all. With this move
he seeks to reconstruct on firmer ground the shaky assumption on which the entire edifice
of functionalism was founded—value consensus. The unrealistic and empirically refutable
assertion that all members of society share the same substantive values was the perennial
Achilles heel of Parsons and his followers. By revealing a deeper level of shared cognitive
forms beneath the surface disagreements of value contents, Alexander can have his cake
and eat it too. He can acknowledge the clash of groups on particular interests while
asserting that all are constrained and controlled by the common forms of discourse through
which these interests are expressed. Bourdieu has spent most of his career refuting precisely
this assumption of common cognitive forms. As he shows empirically in Distinction and
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elsewhere, different classes have different cognitive structures of evaluation and
classification that are unconscious and conditioned by social position. Other empirical
work on this topic by Michèle Lamont (1992, 2000), Herbert Gans (1962), and others also
validates these differences. So, for example, Alexander assumes that American political
discourse is organized around the fundamental opposition between universalism and
particularism, with the former positively evaluated by the vast majority of Americans. But
Lamont reveals that while universalistic evaluations are strong in the middle and uppermiddle
classes (Lamont 1992), working-class people generally pride themselves on their
particularism, e.g., their devotion to their specific family members, friends, religion, and
country (Lamont 2000).
Bourdieu goes so far as to argue in Distinction (Bourdieu 1984, pp 397–465) that the
very ability to participate in political discourse is itself a trait confined to the dominant class
in societies. Political discourse is, by definition, the ability to formulate opinions and
pronouncements on abstract, universal issues that are removed from the practical,
immediate interests of everyday life. To speak politically is to address the common good,
the universal interest or, better put, to express one’s particular interests in the language of
the universal. But the ability to address this universal interest in a neutral, disinterested
language assumes a distance from the practical urgencies of existence that is available only
to the class with abundant resources. Political discourse is the peculiar product of the
formalizing, abstracting habitus of the dominant class, whose abundant resources remove it
from the realm of necessity. The dominated classes have neither the resources nor the
habitus, which these resources condition, to participate in the lofty, universal realm of
political discourse. They are too busy ensuring their own particular existence in practical
action. When they do try to enter the political field, they illegitimately resort to particularistic,
moralizing judgments that reflect their practical interests, thus violating the rules
of the game. And when a few from the dominated classes do learn the foreign language of
politics through experience and explicit study, they are caught in the impossible bind of
expressing dominated interests in a form peculiar to the dominant, and are thus condemned
to failure before they begin. Interestingly enough, Alexander’s own empirical analyses of
American political discourse seems to validate Bourdieu’s assertion that it is a game
dominated by the dominant. The contests he surveys, from the Bank War to Watergate, are
struggles and arguments between different fractions of the dominant class. No workingclass
or poor voices are found in the numerous quotes he reproduces from the
Congressional Record or from the editorials letters to the Washington Post and Los
Angeles Times. And this is not because Alexander’s sample of opinions is biased. It is
because the only voices heard in the halls of Congress and in the pages of major
newspapers are those who know how to speak the political language, which is available
only to the privileged. So Alexander’s cognitive consensus is an illusory one—it exists only
because those who disagree with elite opinions because they are deprived of resources
cannot express their disagreement because they are also deprived of the legitimate political
categories with which to debate their own deprivation.
The weaknesses of Bourdieu’s weak program: Alexander’s legitimate criticisms
Not all of Jeffrey Alexander’s punches against Bourdieu’s corpus of cultural sociology are
low blows, however. Some are fair jabs that land on important weaknesses and
inconsistencies in his theorizing. If Bourdieu’s theory of the complex interrelation of
material and cultural factors is to be defended against Alexander’s insistence on the
398 Theor Soc (2007) 36:381–413
absolute autonomy of culture, then these vulnerabilities must be addressed and ultimately
strengthened. I believe this task to be eminently possible, and Bourdieu himself points the
way. He only rarely addresses critics directly, and is loathe to admit any substantial changes
in his thinking over the course of its long development. Yet, a close reading reveals
important conceptual shifts in his later works that seem to be related to Bourdieu’s growing
political engagement. These shifts pertain to the common source of all of Alexander’s
legitimate criticisms—namely, the grounding of an autonomous knowledge that provides
critical leverage against the existing society. If it is true, as Bourdieu asserts, that the
products of even autonomous cultural fields are based on class privilege and ultimately
appropriated by the dominant to legitimate and reproduce their power, then how can society
be criticized and changed? And how is it possible to create, as Bourdieu claims to be, an
objective, universal knowledge of society that is free of the taint of subjective, particular
interests?
One legitimate criticism that follows from Bourdieu’s inability to ground autonomous,
critical knowledge is that his theory of social change is weak, if not nonexistent. Alexander
alleges that Bourdieu’s failure to theorize ideas that transcend the particular class interests
of a society leaves him unable to account for structural changes, a charge shared by even
Bourdieu’s most sympathetic commentators (Collins 1981; Gartman 1991). I have argued
that the concept of habitus is not as rigidly determining of behavior as Alexander claims,
and that there is indeterminacy between the habitus ingrained by social structures and the
actions that they structure, thus providing for variation. However, Alexander is right to
assert that this variation is not great, and that in the end these contingent actions reproduce
the structure of social relations that produced them. Thus, Bourdieu states in The Logic of
Practice that although actors in a field struggle over the distribution of resources within it,
they do not usually challenge the rules of distribution but seek merely to change individual
positions. Hence, such struggles “can only ever perform partial revolutions,” not
revolutions of the entire structure (Bourdieu 1990b, p 138). So even though Bourdieu
postulates that practical resistance to power is almost inevitable, he adamantly holds that
this does not undermine the acceptance of this power that is instilled by the coincidence of
social structures and mental structures (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p 74).
One reason that social struggles in Bourdieu seem only to reproduce, not undermine, the
broader social structure is that he sees them confined almost entirely to the “field of power,”
that is, the dominant class. In particular, there is usually a struggle between the economic
and intellectual fractions of the bourgeoisie over which kind of capital, economic or
cultural, should determine the distribution of wealth and power. However, since both
fractions share a common interest in the domination of other classes and are also locked
together in mutually beneficial circuits of legitimation – the cultural capital produced by
intellectuals is appropriated by businessmen and executives to legitimate their economic
capital – it is not surprising that their conflict does not go so far as to challenge the system
of domination in general. Bourdieu conceives of the nondominant classes as almost
completely passive, especially the working class. The latter has so thoroughly internalized
its own domination in a fatal taste for necessity that it lacks the very language of political
discourse. Workers may sometimes be mobilized by fractions of the dominant class as allies
in their intraclass struggle, but they seem incapable of independently expressing their own
interest in a fundamental transformation of the system of domination (Bourdieu 2000, p 103).
Bourdieu’s only attempt to account for social change within his theory is based on the
concept of hysteresis, which is inherently incapable of addressing fundamental, structural
change. I agree with Alexander that this concept is problematic, although not merely for the
reasons he gives. He fails to criticize the fundamentally functionalist logic underlying
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hysteresis, which has much in common with functionalist theories of change like Neil
Smelser’s (1959, 1962). Both are based on equilibrium models of society and see change as
a temporary “break in equilibrium,” as Bourdieu (1988, p 156) puts it. The general model
holds that the objective opportunities for success in a field ingrain compatible expectations
in the habitus of individual participants. But because these expectations are relatively
durable, they lag behind the changes in a field’s resource structure. In the only case of
hysteresis developed by Bourdieu, the French student revolt of the 1960s, he attributes the
change in the resource structure of the academic field to a demographic shift—an influx of
new entrants competing in the field drove salaries and job opportunities down below their
previously formed expectations. But if resistance to a power structure is merely a matter of
maladjustment between opportunities and expectations, it is necessarily short-lived, for as
soon as the new structure of opportunity ingrains into participants’ habitus new and lower
expectations, the grounds for discontent disappear, as Bourdieu argues in the student revolt
case (Bourdieu 1988, pp 166–167). And since he postulates that childhood habitus may be
changed by the current structure of the field in which individuals participate, such
adaptation need not wait for the next generation. Thus, as Alexander claims, it is difficult
within this theory to explain how ideas critical of the entire social structure arise. In the
long run, reproduction of what exists seems assured.
This is not to say, of course, that Bourdieu intends his theory to be pessimistic and to
forestall social change. On the contrary, he sees his work as exposing the mechanisms of
class reproduction in order to break the spell of misrecognition. If people understand the
ways in which cultural capital serves as a disinterested cover for the reproduction of
economic interests, then the system of inequalities will stand exposed to the informed and
concerted actions of the dominated. Indeed, in the 1990s Bourdieu personally put his theory
to political use as a leader of the European resistance to the neoliberal project of capitalist
globalization. But the existence of Bourdieu’s entire critical project raises the crucial
question of self-accounting or reflexivity, as Alexander points out. If academic or scholastic
knowledge is, as Bourdieu holds, necessarily based on the privileged removal from
practical necessities, which blinds it to the practical reason that guides the actions of most
people, how does Bourdieu’s own academic theorizing escape this fallacy? How has he
avoided the class determinations that distort the productions of other theorists? Further, to
the extent that he is engaged not merely in scientific research on but also a critique of
existing social structures, on what basis beyond self-interest does he ground this critique?
(Alexander 1995, pp 179–186). Bourdieu is hard-pressed to claim objectivity for any
knowledge, including his own, since he so prominently declares that all culture is arbitrary
and particular, and that there exists no neutral basis or viewpoint for declaring one type
superior to others (Bourdieu 1984, pp 32, 199). This argument is especially strong in
Distinction, where he refutes the Kantian assertion that there exists a pure, “genuinely
human” aesthetic, superior to all others because removed from the realm of necessity and its
animal pleasures. Bourdieu argues that Kant’s pure aesthetic is an “illusion of universality”
that masks the particular aesthetic of the dominant class, whose “attempted imposition of a
definition of the genuinely human is nothing less than the monopoly of humanity”
(Bourdieu 1984, pp 493, 491). Even more militantly relativistic is the earlier analysis of
education in Reproduction, in which he declares that the knowledge imposed on pupils in
school is a “cultural arbitrary” that cannot be deduced from any universal principle. Its
imposition is merely an act of power, a “symbolic violence” that ultimately reproduces the
subordination of the lower classes because, although they have no chance of really
acquiring this knowledge, they are forced to recognize the superiority of it and its
possessors (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977, pp 8–10).
400 Theor Soc (2007) 36:381–413
Despite Bourdieu’s assertion that all knowledge is interested, he argues that scientific
objectivity is possible and he claims such a status for his work. What makes objectivity
attainable even in the face of ubiquitous self-interest is the existence of fields that instill an
interest in disinterestedness. In such fields actors win rewards only by actions that reveal an
unconcern for achieving money and power outside the field. The family is one such field in
nearly every society, for here one wins recognition and praise by putting the interests of
one’s kin ahead of self-interest. In modern societies, science is also an autonomous field
that inverts the law of economic interest operating in the rest of society. Once the field has
secured, usually from the state and universities, a sufficient amount of resources to support
practitioners outside the economically interested world of business and industry, it is able to
establish its own form of reward, symbolic capital (recognition), and autonomous rules for
distributing it. Then all those who would win this reward must sublimate their selfinterested
actions into scientific expression—that is, they must best opponents by
producing better science, as defined by the rules (Bourdieu 1998b, pp 85–88, 109–112;
2000, pp 109–114; 2004, passim). Among the sciences, sociology has a special role to
play in securing the autonomy of all intellectual fields that would be free of external
determination, for it brings to consciousness the social processes by which fields emerge
and operate. When sociologists discover the ways in which habitus conditioned by classes
outside autonomous fields determine perceptions and preferences, then scientists and
intellectuals can consciously neutralize their effects and reinforce the autonomous rules
of the field. “That means that agents become something like ‘subjects’ only to the extent
that they consciously master the relation they entertain with their dispositions. They
can deliberately let them ‘act’ or they can on the contrary inhibit them by virtue of
consciousness” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p 137).
As Alexander notes (Alexander 1995, pp 182–186), however, it is questionable whether
scientists can thus lift themselves by the bootstraps of their reflexive knowledge out of the
class determinations that Bourdieu postulates. But even if they could, there is a more
substantial barrier to objectivity within his own theory that Bourdieu does not address—the
use of the products of cultural fields by the economic fraction of the bourgeoisie to
legitimate its class power. This fraction of the dominant class is directly involved in fields
where self-interest is blatantly and ubiquitously sought. Consequently, they can appear to
others as selflessly superior, and not as the selfish exploiters that they really are, only by
appropriating autonomous works of art and culture, which are produced without the taint of
direct monetary interest. By “throwing away” their money on art, cultural activities, and
refinements that have no immediate pay-off, these people appear selfless, above the crass
struggle for advantage. So, in fact, the more the cultural fields are autonomous and invert
the economic logic of the rest of society, the more the dominant fraction of the dominant
class benefits from appropriating their goods (Bourdieu 2000, pp 104–105). For example,
the more scientists in universities and government are free from manipulation by
politicians, the better able are politicians to use their research convincingly to justify their
interested policies. For example, political defenders of the oil industry can better legitimate
their economic interests by citing the research of reputable, independent scientists
questioning global warming than by relying on the research of scientists directly employed
by oil companies.
Having recognized this use of autonomous culture to legitimate power, however,
Bourdieu then states that “it can also happen that artists or writers are, directly or indirectly,
at the origin of large-scale symbolic revolutions...capable of shaking the deepest structures
of the social order...(2000, p 105). He seems to believe deeply in this ability of cultural
producers to create genuinely critical work that cannot be appropriated by those in power to
Theor Soc (2007) 36:381–413 401
legitimate their particular interests, and for this reason has made the defense of intellectual
autonomy the centerpiece of much of his political activism (see, e.g., Bourdieu 1996,
pp 337–348; Bourdieu and Haacke 1995). But Bourdieu seems unable to specify the social
conditions under which autonomous fields produce critical as opposed to legitimating
culture. He is equally hard-pressed to establish the grounds for the objectivity of critical
culture, a way to argue that it is not merely a knowledge for intellectuals that promotes their
particular interests as part of the dominant class but also a universal knowledge that is
accessible and beneficial to all humanity.
As a consequence of these problems, Bourdieu cannot reflexively account for himself
and his own critical theory, as Alexander has charged (Alexander 1995, pp 185–186). That
is, he cannot give a creditable sociological account of how it is that he, coming from a
particular background and standing in a particular position in the intellectual field, has been
able, unlike most other intellectuals, to penetrate the misrecognitions of class reproduction
and offer an objective theory that exposes the true workings of society. Biographical
accounts tell us that Bourdieu comes from a lower-class background, the son of a peasantturned-postal-worker
in Deguin, a small town in Southwestern France (Swartz 1997, p 16).
How is it, then, that a child with a lower-class and provincial habitus was able to reach the
pinnacle of the French academic field, given that his own theory postulates that the practical
dispositions imbued by such backgrounds disadvantage their holders in scholastic fields,
which privilege theory over practicality, form over function? Bourdieu has generally
refused to engage in such personal reflexivity, preferring instead to focus on reflexive
accounts of the origins and dynamics of entire fields (e.g., Bourdieu 2000, pp 33–42). But
his own theory postulates that the initial placement of actors in a field, or their exclusion
from it entirely, is determined by the childhood habitus derived from their class
backgrounds. Until the posthumous publication of a course of lectures on science
(Bourdieu 2004), he refused to perform on himself the sort of class analysis to which he
routinely subjects the academics, artists, writers, and others he studies. And when Bourdieu
does vaguely refer to his own “social trajectory,” his remarks often contradict his theory.
For example, after remarking on his “youth in a tiny and remote village of Southwestern
France,” he states that “I could meet the demands of schooling only by renouncing many of
my primary experiences and acquisitions...” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p 204). But the
dispositions of habitus are supposed to be unconscious, and thus unavailable for any sort of
willful, rational “renunciation.” So ultimately Bourdieu cannot account for his own social
trajectory without invoking the type of conscious choice that his theory denies is possible.
Self-revisions of Bourdieu’s weak theory
To extricate himself from this series of dilemmas, Bourdieu would first have to renounce
the arbitrariness of culture—that is, he would have to show that there are objective,
universal grounds for privileging some knowledge and practices over others. Then, he
would have to explain how some social positions have greater access to this universal
knowledge than others. A close examination of his later works reveals that this is exactly
what Bourdieu does, self-consciously. Beginning in the late 1980s, there emerges a clear
shift in his conceptualization of culture that seems to be associated with his escalating
activism. It is as if his intervention in European struggles against American-style
neoliberalism and welfare retrenchment forces Bourdieu to intellectually ground his
political decisions in some universal beyond the clash of particular interests. This shift
emerges in Practical Reason (Bourdieu 1998b), a collection of essays written between 1988
402 Theor Soc (2007) 36:381–413
and 1994. In these he begins to dismantle his concept of the “cultural arbitrary” and argue
for a universal principle of judgment that transcends class position. Thus, radically
reversing his argument in Distinction that Kant’s formal aesthetic is an illusory universal
peculiar to the upper class, Bourdieu writes that “I am ready to concede that Kant’s
aesthetics is true,” and that his notion of the beautiful as pure pleasure is a “(theoretical)
universal possibility” of which all humanity is capable (Bourdieu 1998b, p 135). But even
though all have the capacity to grasp the beautiful, some are “deprived of the adequate
categories of aesthetic perception and appreciation” by the unequal distribution of the
economic resources that are the necessary condition for this capacity (Bourdieu 1998b,
p 135). The truly human aesthetic of pure pleasure, removed from any practical necessity of
securing a livelihood, is available only to those with sufficient resources to be able to forget
about practicalities.
At the same time, Bourdieu explicitly embraces the necessary corollary of his concession
of superiority to the aesthetic of pure pleasure characteristic of the upper class—the
judgment of the working class’s practical aesthetic as inferior. In Distinction there are
numerous passages in which he goes beyond scientific neutrality to ridicule upper-class
culture from the down-to-earth, practical perspective of the working class. So, for example,
at one point he argues that the functional aesthetic of working people inclines them toward
honesty, to do what they do without kidding themselves, while the upper-class formal
aesthetic is “a sort of essential hypocrisy” that “masks the interest in function by the
primacy given to form, so that what people do, they do as if they were not doing it”
(Bourdieu 1984, p 200). But beginning in Practical Reason (Bourdieu 1998b, p 137),
Bourdieu explicitly criticizes this preference for working-class culture as radical chic,
ressentiment, and class racism, and admits that he has been guilty of these errors. Although
such assertions seem to praise the masses, Bourdieu states, they really serve to enforce their
domination by transforming “a sociologically mutilated being...into a model of human
excellence” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p 212).
So this ultimately very comfortable way of respecting the ‘people,’ which, under the
guise of exalting the working class, helps to enclose it in what it is by converting
privation into a choice or an elective accomplishment, provides all the profits of a show
of subversive, paradoxical generosity, while leaving things as they are, with one side in
possession of its truly cultivated culture (or language), which is capable of absorbing
its own distinguished subversion, and the other with its culture or language devoid of
any social value and subject to abrupt devaluations...which are fictitiously rehabilitated
by a simple operation of theoretical false accounting (Bourdieu 2000, p 76).
In other words, simplistically validating working-class culture as equal to or better than
the formal, high culture of the upper class serves to enforce class inequality by accepting or
obscuring the maldistribution of economic and cultural capital that gives rise to classes and
their cultural differences to begin with. Or, as another critical sociologist, Theodor Adorno
(1974, p 28), puts the point more succinctly, “glorification of the splendid underdogs is
nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.” Thus, it
prevents the formation of what Bourdieu (2000, p 80) calls a true cultural Realpolitik,
which would fight to provide everyone with the resources necessary to realize the universal
potential present in all.
This brings us to a more fundamental question about the high culture that Bourdieu now
praises. What makes it universal? Which of its traits tap the “anthropological possibilities”
inherent in humanity? Bourdieu mentions two such traits—its disinterested privileging of
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the group over the individual, and its autonomous creation. I turn first to the second of
these, which he develops less extensively. Bourdieu asks himself suggestively in An
Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p 87): “Is there not
something universal about culture? Yes, ascesis. Everywhere culture is constructed against
nature, that is, through effort, exercise, suffering; all human societies put culture above
nature...It is in this sense that we can say that ‘high’ art is more universal.” Authentic
culture is the product of effort and labor, “the endless series of refusals and transcendences”
through which humans lift themselves above the heteronomy of nature (p 87). Culture is
thus the realm of autonomous, self-conscious efforts, chosen by humans for their purposes,
not those forced on them by material necessities. It is the useless effort humans impose on
themselves through the self-made rules of their games. Consequently, any cultural practices
or productions that are forced on people by material function, the economic necessities of
earning a living, are not really culture, for they are not freely chosen. It is because workingclass
culture is focused precisely on such practical functions that Bourdieu now describes it
as mutilated, devoid of any social value, and characterizes its obverse, high culture removed
from necessity, as more universal. The ultimate pay-off of this truly human high culture is
not, Bourdieu informs us, anything practical such as money or power, but the pleasure of
free play itself. Thus, quoting and paraphrasing Mallarmé’s defense of literature, despite a
recognition of the purely fictive nature of its transcendent referent, he writes: “It is in the
name of literary pleasure, this ‘ideal joy,’ sublime product of sublimation, that one is
entitled to save the game of letters, and even, as we shall see, the literary game itself”
(Bourdieu 1996, p 275). This grounding of culture in the inherent human capacity for
conscious, autonomous activity, in and for itself, sounds remarkably like Marx’s early
analysis of labor in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx 1975) and
its development by members of the Frankfurt School, especially Theodor Adorno (1984)
and Herbert Marcuse (1972, 1978). And, if pressed for the foundation or location of this
human capacity for autonomy, one could confidently point to the large cerebral cortex that
developed in the evolution of homo sapiens, thus disengaging the species’ behavior from
physical determination by inherited genes and their natural selection and allowing learning
from experience.
The second characteristic of high or formal culture that renders it universal, and the one
that Bourdieu develops more extensively, is its disinterested orientation, its selfless
dedication to the group as opposed to self-interest. He argues in Practical Reason
(Bourdieu 1998b, p 90) that the disinterested cultural practices of the dominant class, which
bear no taint of the practicality of working-class culture, “can only fulfill their symbolic
function of legitimation precisely because they benefit in principle from universal
recognition—people cannot openly deny them without denying their own humanity.”
What people universally recognize in these practices is the imperative of the universal, that
is, the demand that the interests of the group take precedent over individual interests.
“There is nothing that groups recognize and reward more unconditionally and demand more
imperatively than the unconditional manifestation of respect for the group as a group
(which is affirmed, in particular, in seemingly quite anodyne rituals of ‘civic religion’), and
they give social recognition even to the recognition (even if feigned and hypocritical) of the
rule that is implied in strategies of universalization” (Bourdieu 2000, p 125). Because they
have no instincts ensuring survival built into their genes, humans are social animals, relying
upon the group to teach such behavior and to nurture and protect the young during this
socialization. Since the very survival of the individual and the species thus depends on the
group, humans universally recognize and reward actions that negate the subjective and
personal in favor of the objective and transpersonal, that deny egoism and particular interest
404 Theor Soc (2007) 36:381–413
in favor of generosity and disinterestedness. This also implies a recognition of ethical
universality, the ideal that society’s rules and norms apply equally to all, regardless of
resources or position. So despite Alexander’s arguments to the contrary, Bourdieu now
recognizes the universality of culture, the existence of general norms and ideas applied to
all people and situations. But unlike Alexander, who constructs the universal as a realm
apart from and in opposition to self-interested behavior, he reveals the imbrication of the
two, arguing that the universal advances only through the self-interested struggles of those
who have a particular interest in it.
One way that particular interests advance the universal is by using it cynically—
Bourdieu calls this the strategy of universalization. Actors pursue their individual economic
interests, but seek to hide this fact by presenting these interests in the guise of universal
values recognized by the group. By doing so, they receive not only a primary return of
economic profits, but also a secondary return of symbolic profits, that is, recognition of
their worthiness by the group. Bourdieu uses the example of individuals among the Kabyle
who break the group’s traditional marriage rules in order to make a economically profitable
match, but seek after the fact to “universalize” their behavior by portraying it as actually
conforming to the rules (Bourdieu 1990b, pp 108–110). This hypocritical use is the homage
that vice pays to virtue—by using the universal to hide self-interest the dissemblers
acknowledge and maintain its universality. Such hypocritical use of the universal aside,
however, Bourdieu argues that the universal is more genuinely advanced by the clash of
particular interests when social differentiation produces cultural fields that are autonomous
from the economic field. In these fields actors pursue their self-interests, but the primary
stake is not economic profits but symbolic profits, recognition from the group as a whole on
the basis of the agreed-upon rules of the game. Thus, Bourdieu postulates that actors in
fields such as science and art have a particular interest in disinterestedness, that is, they
receive recognition only when they produce work aimed not at making money but at
advancing the entire field by playing within the rules. Thus, the rules of the field itself force
actors to sublimate self-interest into universal interest, or the good of the whole group
(Bourdieu 2000, pp 77, 99).
In his earlier work Bourdieu (1996, pp 337–348) is thus willing to see universal norms
and standards at work only in those fields with sufficient autonomy from extrinsic powers
to be able to set and enforce rules that harness self-interest for the general advance of
science, art, scholastics, literature, etc. In this conception, the “universal” appears plural and
fragmented, with each autonomous cultural field advancing its own particular universal or
group good, based on the privileged possession of enough internal resources to be able to
ignore the imperatives of those who hold external power. But such a vision of the universal
is inherently unsatisfactory, for it leaves in place the possibility of competing and clashing
conceptions of the good. But in his later work Bourdieu begins to embrace the notion of a
social institution or field that is the repository of the universal or common interest of society
as a whole—the state. Bourdieu’s earlier work (Bourdieu 1998b, pp 35–63; Bourdieu and
Wacquant 1992, pp 111–115) is marked by a cynical concept of the state typical of conflict
theorists—the state merely institutionalizes dominant-class culture and interests, which are
legitimated by falsely portraying them as universal, the standards of judgment for all. But as
Bourdieu begins to recognize the existence of an authentic universal, his portrayal of the
state subtly shifts. While continuing to see the existing state as favoring the dominant, he
argues that it represents a potential universal that is actually furthered by cynical
dissimulation. Because legitimation of the state requires reference to the values of
neutrality and disinterested loyalty to the public good, “such values impose themselves with
increasing force upon the functionaries of the state as the history of the long work of
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symbolic construction unfolds whereby the official representation of the state as the site of
universality and of service to the general interest is invented and imposed” (Bourdieu
1998b, p 59). That is, by using the universal good to legitimate its particular interests, the
dominant class unwittingly creates a standard that its state representatives are forced to live
up to by the dominated. Consequently, a site is created for a struggle over the definition of
the public good, which gives the dominated the power to force the state to actually adopt
policies benefiting the universal interest. Bourdieu’s concept of the state is now profoundly
ambiguous; it is simultaneously the representative of particular economic and political
powers as well as the site of rationality and universality that “is capable of acting as a kind
of umpire, no doubt always somewhat biased, but ultimately less unfavorable to the
interests of the dominated, and to what can be called justice, than what is exalted, under
the false colours of liberty and liberalism, by the advocates of ‘laisser-faire,’ in other words
the brutal and tyrannical exercise of economic force” (Bourdieu 2000, p 127).
With this complex, ambiguous concept of the state Bourdieu’s theory now provides the
dominated classes with a site to struggle for change. Consequently, the reproduction of
existing power structures seems less inevitable and more problematic than in his earlier
theory. Compared to Alexander, Bourdieu now seems to provide for more contingency of
action. The former sees the state as part of the realm of instrumental action, just like the
economy, and hence tainted with the pursuit of particular interests. The universal or
common interest is embodied only outside of this realm, in civil society, where
generalizable cultural codes are said to provide constraints on the instrumental realms of
politics and economics. But it is difficult to see exactly how all people, including those
in the dominated classes, can enter into and shape the institutions that Alexander (2003,
p 121) sees presiding over civil society—voluntary associations, courts, and the media.
None of these is subject to democratic representation, especially the media, which are
increasingly controlled by a few global corporations that shape and mold communication to
their particular interests. The constitutionally guaranteed popular representation in state
institutions seems much firmer ground on which to base the universal, common interest of
all in modern societies, notwithstanding the increasing power that private interests wield
over these.
There is, however, a problem that remains unsolved by Bourdieu’s new formulation of
cultural universals—how to reflexively account for his own theory. Bourdieu now anoints
the bureaucratic (state) and cultural fields as the potential homes of the rationality and
universality that is characteristic of all humanity. But, as he previously argued, the
scholastic fallacy prevents the achievement of this potential. Intellectuals, scientists, artists,
and state bureaucrats generally do not recognize the foundation of material resources upon
which rests their privileged access to rational analysis and universal values. Because this
material condition of their practice remains unseen and unconscious, their knowledge is
distorted, for it neglects material determinants and postulates human behavior as based
solely on freely chosen beliefs and values. By thus attributing to all the freedom that
intellectuals exercise due to their insulation from material necessity, their work most often
functions ideologically to obscure the unfree conditions under which the majority of social
agents operate. So even though these cultural fields embody potential universality, in actual
operation they facilitate the monopoly of universality by those with privileged access to
economic capital.
In his recent work, however, Bourdieu has theorized a way out of this dilemma by
specifying the conditions under which some intellectuals, like himself, can break with the
scholastic fallacy and reveal the material conditions of all human behavior, including their
own. This break with the established ideology is, like most dissatisfaction and dissent in
406 Theor Soc (2007) 36:381–413
Bourdieu, the product of a discrepancy between the subjective habitus embodied in agents
and the objective structure of fields. But in this case the problem is caused by a discrepancy
not between a durable habitus and the changing field, but between a durable field and the
changing position of individuals in it. As Bourdieu writes in Pascalian Meditations:
In particular because of the structural transformations which abolish or modify certain
positions, and also because of their inter- or intragenerational mobility, the homology
between the space of positions and the space of dispositions is never perfect and there
are always some agents “out on a limb,” displaced, out of place and ill at ease. The
discordance...may be the source of a disposition towards lucidity and critique which
leads them to refuse to accept as self-evident the expectations and demands of the
post...The parvenus and the déclassés...are more likely to bring to consciousness that
which, for others, is taken for granted, because they are forced to keep watch on
themselves and consciously correct the “first movements” of a habitus that generates
inappropriate or misplaced behaviors (Bourdieu 2000, pp 157, 163).
Thus, agents like Bourdieu who are socialized in lower-class positions but move up into
the cultural bourgeoisie experience a mismatch between their childhood habitus and
structural position. Their habitus inclines them to practical action aimed at material
necessities, while their position in a cultural field requires disinterested action that denies
economic exigencies in the name of pure knowledge. Because of their practical dispositions
and heightened sensitivity to material deprivation, these parvenus are more likely to see
through the cultural field’s facade of disinterestedness to the economic resources on which
it rests. And in the social sciences, these parvenus are inclined to resist “the asepticized and
derealized representation of the social world offered by the socially dominant discourse”
and insist upon the practical foundation of all social action (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992,
p 249). In his last lectures delivered at the Collège de France, which were published
posthumously, Bourdieu (2004, pp 94–114) reflexively applies this insight to himself,
accounting for his own ability to penetrate objectively the scholastic fallacy and its
ideological misrecognition of the origins of social advantage. He argues that his lower-class
habitus predisposed him to an anti-intellectualism that sharpened his critical insight into the
hypocrisies of the intellectual field (see also Bourdieu 1993, pp 269–270). But now this
erstwhile parvenu, having experienced the true autonomy of the scholastic field, no longer
resentfully rejects its disinterested values as mere deception but labels them universal, and
calls for their generalization throughout society by a more equal distribution of the material
resources on which they rest.
Bourdieu’s belated political engagement: Application of the universal
Bourdieu’s new conception of an authentic universality creates a space for political
intervention in his theory. As long as he conceived the structure of domination as inevitably
reproducing itself through creating in individuals differential cultural dispositions that could
not be judged from a common standard, then any attempt to rationally intervene and to
change society seemed futile. Rational interventions by intellectuals were necessarily
imprisoned in their own scholastic fallacies and biases, imposing their theoretical view of
the social world on unwitting members of the dominated class, whose practical dispositions
prevented them from generalizing beyond their immediate material interests to a broader
political consciousness (Bourdieu 1984, pp 397–465). Besides, there were no social
Theor Soc (2007) 36:381–413 407
institutions outside the battle of particular interests and points of view that could be used to
exert pressure on existing structures of domination. However, once Bourdieu postulates a
cultural universal recognized by all, as well as its institutional embodiment in the state, then
the possibility is created for a universal political intervention, both by and for all of
humanity. It is not by chance, then, that the period of these theoretical revisions, the late
1980s, is also marked by Bourdieu’s first foray into political activism, although it is unclear
which factor was the cause and which the effect.
Throughout his career Bourdieu’s work expresses an ongoing interest in politics, as
David Swartz (2003) has effectively demonstrated. All Bourdieu’s research and writing is
critical of existing power structures and dedicated to exposing the social mechanisms of
their creation and reproduction in order to undermine their legitimacy. But early on
Bourdieu’s political fights are largely internal to the intellectual field, battling for scientific
research against academic bureaucrats and pop sociologists. However, by the late 1980s his
involvement becomes more direct, as he intervenes in the external world of politics beyond
the academy. Swartz (2003) argues that this increased external activism is explained by
Bourdieu’s increased centrality in the intellectual field, which gives him more symbolic
power to fight, as well as changes in this field itself toward greater domination by popular
media and politicians, which undermines the autonomy of intellectuals. His initial activism
is thus directed at defending the autonomy of cultural fields like science and art against
interference by these external forces. Bourdieu becomes particularly concerned with the
encroachment of commercial media and publishers on intellectuals’ rational commentary
about important social issues. Increasingly, he argues, second-rate writers and journalists
working for commercial media, whose main interest is to make money by entertaining the
masses, are passing themselves off as experts, thus shaping public opinion without taking
into account the research done by authentic scientists under the disinterested rules of the
field. This willingness of some to subordinate knowledge and reason to the economic
exigencies of the market threatens the hard-won autonomy of all intellectuals and their
ability to offer, on the basis of independent scholastic authority, a critical, countervailing
force to the structures of domination. Using “For a Corporatism of the Universal” as his
rallying cry,” Bourdieu calls in 1989 for an “Internationale of intellectuals,” a collective
organization to overcome national divisions and fight for the autonomy of reason from
economic and political power (Bourdieu 1996, pp 337–348). To start building such an
organization, Bourdieu founds in the same year Liber: Revue Européenne des Livres, a
journal designed to provide a forum for cross-disciplinary and cross-national exchanges
between intellectuals (Swartz 1997, pp 247–269; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, pp 47–59).
This initial stage of political activism is based on a concept of the universal, but one
which is rather narrow. The concept is confined to specific cultural fields that have achieved
autonomy from power and thus have the ability to impose rules guaranteeing their
collective interests. In his slogan of “a corporatism of the universal,” however, Bourdieu
reveals the theoretical contradictions of his first directly political intervention. The word
“corporatism” is tainted by connotations of exclusion and individuality—it calls for
organizing society around self-interested and self-governing occupational groups that are
constituted as individuals in the eyes of the state. But if the universalism of culture is the
particular prerogative of autonomous groups of intellectuals and, as Bourdieu concedes at
this stage, the reproducer and legitimator of economic inequality, how can it be really
universal, in the interests of all? How does such a universal deliver us from the struggle for
particular interests to a common interest that can and should be defended by all? This
universal seems to be merely another cynical mask for the privilege of the particular group
408 Theor Soc (2007) 36:381–413
of intellectuals. Perhaps it is the realization of this theoretical contradiction that forces
Bourdieu to reconceptualize the idea of the universal, not as the privilege of intellectuals
but as the potential of all humanity, the general recognition of autonomy and the collective
that requires only the equalization of resources to achieve full realization. Or perhaps it is
the practical contradiction of seeking to mobilize general political support for a program
defending the privilege of intellectuals that forces him to rethink his theory of universalism.
Regardless of the causal sequence, Bourdieu’s broadening of this concept coincides with a
broadening of his political intervention, from defending the autonomy of privileged
intellectuals from economic and political interference to defending the autonomy of
dominated classes from the neoliberal program of market globalization.
This shift in Bourdieu’s political program is tied to his postulation of the state as
privileged site and guarantor of his broadened concept of the universal. By the early 1990s,
Bourdieu explicitly recognizes that cultural fields such as science and art must rely on the
support of the state, since the autonomous cultural standards they impose contradict the
profit standard of the economic market (Bourdieu and Haacke 1995, pp 69–77). But this
support of disinterested science and art is just one aspect of the state’s general role as
guarantor of the collective interest: “the state, whether one likes it or not, is the official
guarantor” [of] “everything that pertains to the order of the universal—that is, to the general
interest,” including hospitals, schools, radio and television stations, museums, and
laboratories (Bourdieu and Haacke 1995, p 72). Consequently, it is now clear what
intellectuals have in common with the dominated class of society—greater reliance on the
state for a livelihood as a result of a lack of resources from the market. Bourdieu now
argues that the “social state”or the “left hand of the state” – government spending programs
for income supplements, health, and education – is the result of popular struggles of the
past and provides everyone a measure of freedom from the tyranny and individualism of
the market. Thus, it ensures the universal human attributes of autonomy and solidarity. At
the same time, however, he recognizes that the social state is opposed from within by what
he calls the “right hand of the state,” the coercive apparatus of the technocratic ministries.
This part of the state serves the particular interests of capitalist elites and supports
neoliberal attempts to roll back the hard-won protection of universal interests by the social
state in the name of global competitiveness. During this period Bourdieu increasingly
becomes the spokesperson for the European movement of workers, farmers, intellectuals,
and others opposing this neoliberal reaction, especially its attempt to construct a European
Union that places economic profitability ahead of social welfare. He not only gives
speeches and writes articles criticizing the new financial technocrats of the European
Union (Bourdieu 1998a, 2003), but also organizes a research team that undertakes a
massive empirical study of the results of social welfare cuts in France, entitled La Misère du
Monde (translated as The Weight of the World, Bourdieu et al. 1999).
This period is also marked by an escalating critique of mass culture as a barrier to the
reasoned defense of the universals embedded in the social state. In his early approach to
culture, which culminates in Distinction, Bourdieu sees mass culture as the benign
embodiment of the practical habitus of the dominated class, implying that it is neither better
nor worse than, just different from, the high culture that embodies the aesthetic disposition
of the dominant. But once he establishes a universal standard of judgment and struggles to
defend its social locus in intellectual fields and the social state, Bourdieu launches a ruthless
critique of market-dominated mass culture as a support of the neoliberal program. Sounding
remarkably like the Frankfurt School’s analysis of the culture industry (Horkheimer and
Adorno 1972), he argues that the mass media depoliticize the masses by replacing the
Theor Soc (2007) 36:381–413 409
diversity of autonomous art and science with a homogeneous kitsch culture that quasicynically
aims “to seduce the largest number of viewers by playing to their basic drives”
(Bourdieu 2003, p 73). In an ironic inversion of his analysis in Distinction, he argues that
this culture industry produces an “inverted snobbery” that is a mere illusion of democracy.
Indeed, it is the first time in history that the cheapest products of a popular culture (of
a society [the United States] which is economically and politically dominant) are
imposing themselves as chic. The adolescents of all countries who wear baggy pants
with the crotch down at the knee level do not know that the fashion they regard as
both ultrachic and ultramodern finds its origin in U.S. jails, as did a certain taste for
tatoos! This is to say that the civilization of jeans, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s has not
only economic power on its side but also the symbolic power exerted through a
seduction to which the victims themselves contribute (Bourdieu 2003, p 71; see also
Bourdieu 1998a, pp 70–77).
Perhaps for Bourdieu the most pernicious effect of the popular media is to perpetuate
among the masses an apolitical fatalism. As all culture becomes deregulated and
commodified, media conglomerates are able to dominate the debate over the neoliberal
policies from which they benefit, employing their own journalists, experts, and commentators
to define deregulation, individual competition, and social-spending cuts as dictated by the
inevitable laws of economics. This constructed illusion of economic inevitability masks the
immense, consciously pursued political program of the dominant that neoliberalism is in
reality, rendering the dominated incapable of mounting an opposition. “In the name of the
scientific programme of knowledge, converted into a political programme of action, an
immense political operation is being pursued (denied, because it is apparently purely
negative), aimed at creating the conditions for realizing and operating of the ‘theory;’ a
programme of methodical destruction of collectives (neo-classical economics recognizes
only individuals, whether it is dealing with companies, trade unions or families)” (Bourdieu
1998a, pp 95–96). But, Bourdieu goes on to say, “social laws, economic laws and so on
only take effect to the extent that people let them do so” (Bourdieu 1998a, p 55). It is the
job of intellectuals to demystify this ideology of economic fatalism and return these issues
to politics by equipping the people with forms of thought to resist them. Sociology has a
specific contribution to make in overcoming fatalism, for it “teaches how groups function
and how to make use of the laws governing the way they function so as to try to circumvent
them” (Bourdieu 1998a, p 57).
It is clear from Bourdieu’s explicit appeal to conscious political action based on a social
movement enlightened by intellectuals that he has thrown off the last remnants of
deterministic reproduction, for which he is faulted by Alexander. Stimulated by a complex
interaction of theoretical revision and political intervention, he now presents us with a
theory that provides a substantial space for voluntary human action to shape society.
Bourdieu still holds that there exist scientific laws governing the operation and reproduction
of society, but only in so far as people are unaware of them. Once enlightened about their
existence, people may consciously intervene and change these social laws, but only within
the limits of objective possibility. Thus, he calls for a “reasoned utopianism” that rejects
both objectivist automatism and pure voluntarism. Society does not automatically
reproduce itself but can be consciously changed, but only when the selection of the means
and ends of change are informed by scientific knowledge that aligns them with objective
trends (Bourdieu 1998c, p 128).
410 Theor Soc (2007) 36:381–413
Conclusion
Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural sociology has consistently demonstrated a subtle grasp of the
interaction of ideas and beliefs with material determinants of action. But over the course of
his career, he has substantially revised the nature of this interaction. He begins with a
pessimistic conception of culture as objectively determined by particular class interests and
leaving only minimal room for subjective intervention. Yet by his last works he
optimistically conceptualizes culture as potentially universal beliefs and practices, rooted
in specific institutions and providing the basis for autonomous political action to achieve
economic and cultural justice. Although Jeffrey Alexander’s conception of cultural
autonomy achieves some critical leverage against Bourdieu’s early formulations, it pales
in comparison to the revised view of culture in his later works. His formulation of cultural
universals whose realization depends on the distribution of material resources ultimately
leaves more room for conscious human practice than Alexander’s militant voluntarism
founded on the autonomy of ideas and beliefs from structures of power and wealth. The
insistence in theory on the freedom of human actions from material determinants is no boon
to freedom in reality if such determinants actually exist. On the contrary, it serves as a
support for unfreedom, for it obscures the material inequalities that differentially constrain
choice, preventing people from taking conscious actions to overcome or lessen their effects.
The autonomy of culture from the economy is not, as Alexander asserts, a prerequisite for
the proper understanding of social life. It is the accomplishment of social life, the end and
aim of associated humanity. To assert that this end has already been achieved, in the here
and now, is not only a barrier to good social science; it is also a barrier to the realization of
autonomy itself.
Acknowledgments For their helpful readings and suggestions at various stages of this article, I thank
Randall Collins, Douglas Marshall, and anonymous reviewers for The American Journal of Sociology and
Theory and Society.
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David Gartman is Professor of Sociology at the University of South Alabama. His main interests are
culture, art, history, and theory. His books include Auto Slavery: The Labor Process in the American
Automobile Industry (1986) and Auto Opium: A Social History of American Automobile Design (1994). He is
currently completing a book entitled From Autos to Architecture: Fordism and Architectural Aesthetics in the
Twentieth Century.
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