Sylabus
The critical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu belongs to a larger category of critical theories of domination the prototype of which provided Marx. It can be placed in an even larger category of the Hermeneutics of Suspicion (P. Ricoeur) whose founders were Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. According to this approach, people’s self-understandings should not be taken at face value. Whereas they (laymen) interpret their own behavior in moral terms of altruism, sense of justice and general interest, experts in intellectual inquiry have developed special tools which show that in actual fact, people’s behavior is driven by egoism, irrational drives and particular interests. Bourdieu claims that he takes an external look at human reality as a whole (holism) and is, therefore, able to replace a relative and subjective “local knowledge” of actors (doxa) by objective and impartial
“global knowledge” (episteme). He is a (pure) spectator who stands above and outside the studied reality. His knowledge, then, provides an Archimedean point from which emancipation can proceed.
Bourdieu’s critical sociology had a hegemonic position in French social science until the 1980s when the pragmatic sociology emerged. Luc Boltanski and Bruno Latour – each in his own way - stood Bourdieu’s perspective on its head. They replaced an already made social world - seen from without - by the world in the process of being made - seen from within. They put agency before structure and relocated critical powers from the mind of the expert to the mind of the layman. They claimed that, in their efforts at emancipation, the local actors cannot hope for an outside view of a social scientific experts but should rely on their own resources.
In 2000s, Boltanski began to see his reversal of Bourdieu critically as a sign of anti-revolutionary turn of the 1980s and started searching for a synthesis between critical and pragmatic sociology. Latour, on the other hand, has remained unrepentant: to his mind, emancipation can proceed only from below – any pretension to rely on the view from above is untenable. Readings from major works of three authors will help us outline, compare and assess their respective positions.
Requirements
Participation in class discussions, one oral presentation of readings and final written examination (for those students who want to be graded). 1) Introduction 2) Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1984 (1979), Chapter 2, 99 – 169. 3) Ibid. Chapter 4, 169 – 225. 4) Ibid. Chapter 6, 318 – 371. 5) Ibid. Chapter 7, 372 – 396. 6) Luc Boltanski, On Critique. A Sociology of Emancipation, Polity, Cambridge 2011 (2009), Chapter 2, 18 – 49. 7) Ibid., Chapter 3, 50 – 82. 8) Ibid., Chapter 4, 83 – 115. 9) Ibid., Chapter 5 – 6, 116 – 160. 10) Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford University Press 2005, Introduction, 1 – 20 11) Ibid., 141 – 172. 12) Ibid., 173 – 218. 13) Ibid., 219 – 262.